I had played Sacra Terra: Angelic Night right before I played Sacra Terra: Kiss of Death, so a lot of this review is going to be a comparison to that game, for better or for worse.
Sadly, this feels like one step forward and one step back.
The story of the game I will say is a lot of coherent and evident when playing. While in Angelic Night I kind of understood the basic premise but was confused about who we were, why we were doing what we were doing (other than generically just wanting to find a way to escape), and who the Angel was. In this game, the main character and her motivation is a lot clearly, which is great.
This game being newer also has more detail graphics and cutscenes, although I didn't particularly feel like the original game was lacking in that way. The music sadly did not grow on me as much as in the first game, and I would even go so far as to say that at times it felt really out of place in Kiss of Death. It's a lot... I don't know, lighter, more energetic than I felt the scenario really merited so it was strange to be playing the game with this demonic imagery and plot and have this music that did not seem to follow that theme at all. I know that probably a couple of music tracks in a game like this needs to do a lot of heavy lifting, but I personally found the first game to strike a better balance of being neutral but also mildly creepy.
The puzzles and hidden object puzzles were very similar to the first one, sometimes challenging, but didn't feel particularly unfair or overly difficult. In fact some of the non-hidden object puzzles I actually found to be pretty easy, maybe even easier than the ones in the first game. Sadly, no collectibles are included to find in the game unlike the previous entry, and I found myself missing that extra bit of gameplay from Kiss of Death as I made my way through it.
What really continues to disappoint me was the user interface. In Angelic Night, you could view a map, but it was buried in another menu and after reaching the map it has useful information but did not allow you to travel to a location from the map. In Kiss of Death, I am glad to say that they moved the map to a top-level element in the UI and after opening the map you can now travel directly to a location by clicking to select it and then clicking again. I think the only gripe I have is the ugly was it is just stuck into the interface; on many hidden object games, the menu and map are integrated into the bottom navigation bar which is usually themed to the game. In Kiss of Death, the map and menu are just large blue buttons in the top left and right corners of the screen that are not themed at all and stick out like a sore thumb.
But while this part of the game is better, other problems are introduced that were a detriment to the game. Now when you click on part of a scene to see a description of what you may need to use on it to progress, a large caption with the text appears at the top of the screen, but this text covers the "Close" button of any detail windows that would pop up when you clicked on part of a scene. The text needs to be clicked on to close it instead of disappearing on its own after a time, so in order to close any detail scene in a pop-up window, you have to click twice, once to dismiss the text and again to close it. This was annoying for me as I played because like with the map in the previous game it always seemed to force you to take multiple steps to accomplish just one thing.
Another element that I didn't think I would miss but that really caused a lot of confusion for me were the shapes of your cursor. In hidden object games, the cursor will often change in order to give you clues about how you can interact with things in the locations of the game. For example, a hand pointing with an index finger usually indicated you will be traveling to a different location by clicking, a grasping hand usually indicated that whatever you are hovering over can be picked up, or an eye may indicate that you can view a detailed pop-up of the part of the location you are hovering over if you click to explore that specific part of the scene in more detail. These icons are a great and intuitive way to communicate things to players, in fact they work so well that I often forget they are a feature of the game that has to be intentionally implemented in the game. In Kiss of Death, nearly every action just uses a grasping hand cursor and this led to a lot of confusion for me when playing the game. Sometimes you would see a grasping hand and think there is an item for you to pick up only to receive a text banner that actually reveals that you're supposed to use an item there instead. It's just so bizarre that they decided to seemingly make only the grasping hand cursor and use it for all of the different ways that you can interact with things in a scene and I am still not used to it after playing for a few hours time already.
Adding to that, the inventory bar is collapsed by default. I am not a fan of this, but most games have it so that the inventory can be opened without clicking by hovering over the legend at the bottom of the screen, and even better designed games include a lock icon that allows you to lock it in the open position to suit your preferece. That way fans of either style can have the inventory bar behave how they prefer. In this game, the inventory bar can be toggled open or closed by clicking it but cannot be opened by hovering and cannot be locked open. If you click to open the inventory, it will stay open the whole time you play, but oddly if you exit the game and then come back, it will reset to being closed and never saves the state it's in when you quit. This was annoying for me and by far my least favorite implementation of the inventory bar I have yet seen in a game.
And unfortunately that is not all of the UI quirks that bothered me. Lastly, sometimes when you pick an item up and add it to your inventory bar, sometimes what the item is can be ambiguous or hard to identify. Most games will show a text legend for each item in your inventory when you hover over it, but in Kiss of Death you must click the item in order to see the text legend. Furthermore, most hidden object games also turn your cursor into the item from your inventory that you are using when you click on it to confirm you are using an item. In Kiss of Death, the item you click is highlighted but your cursor remains the default, which initially confused me and I kept thinking I hadn't clicked on the item and that it was not selected to use. Similarly to the other confusion hover interactions, selecting an item from your inventory and then hovering over a something in the scene to use it on also displays the grasping hand cursor, which is even more confusing.
Otherwise, I also had constant issues with the hidden object scenes in the game as well. A lot of times, where I had to click on an item to collect it was just in such a bizarre place. For example, there would be a scene that had a crank as an item to find. And I would see something that looked like a crank, and click on it and receive no feedback. I might click a few times to make sure I actually clicked on it, but after it not responding I would assume I was wrong and move on, only to later come back and click all around it to finally collec it. Often where I had to click was outside of the actual object in order to collect it. It was just so frustrating.
The normal puzzles were not particularly remarkable.
I have played a lot of hidden object games and I like to think that as long as the story is understandable, the music and sounds aren't terrible, and the puzzles are fun that I generally rate it favorably. But Kiss of Death is the first one I think that within minutes of starting to play I wanted to quit and uninstall without finishing.
I did not have any technical issues with this game. This game doesn't have any collectibles. This game does include a bonus adventure.
