Samantha Swift and the Hidden Roses of Athena

a great adventure

ok game

Classic hidden object game. On the shorter side and cartoony/stylized, but has an enjoyable story. Kind of shows its age but still very fun to play. DISCLAIMER: if you buy this game, or its sequel Golden Touch from steam, you'll need to replace the .exe file, otherwise neither will start. Still had 1 or 2 crashes but at least it's playable. Maybe buy on sale.

After 15 hours of clicking on things, I have successfully defeated Samantha Swift and her plan to obtain the powers of Athena for nefarious purposes

After playing three Artifex Mundi games, I thought that I would lay off reviewing hidden object games, since I clearly don’t like them. Well, I’ve reconsidered. I don’t dislike these puzzles on principle, so there should be a way to present them to me that I enjoy. I want to see if there’s a hidden object game I can recommend, so let the griping continue! Or maybe not? Is Samantha Swift worth my time? What I can say for sure is, despite the lower production value, I prefer Hidden Roses of Athena to all of the Artifex Mundi games I’ve played simply because it didn’t waste my time. Each area has a hidden object challenge, and once you’ve found every object, you never have to revisit it. I didn’t have to backtrack through long, winding paths across multiple areas to find any puzzles; a puzzle will take up two rooms or multiple rooms around a single hub at most. This was also the shortest HOG I’ve played, comprising eight locations with less than ten puzzles per location. No half-baked side stories, just eight short levels. Unlike Artifex Mundi, where I was begging for the games to end, Samantha Swift not only kept things short, but briskly paced as well. It even had a superior hint system, including an object scanner and limited but plentiful instant hints instead of unlimited hints that take ages to recharge. So can I recommend Samantha Swift and the Hidden Roses of Athena? Not really. Though the simplicity is a breath of fresh air, it doesn’t make up for lack of substance. The game is beyond easy; I had about 25 hints left after completion, and what little thought the puzzles required often had Samantha jumping in with an unsolicited hint. Maybe they were trying to compensate by making the clicker annoyingly precise. If I’m two pixels off or within some inner negative space, the click should catch the object. Again, I prefer this straightforward approach to chasing after a glowing arrow in the Artifex Mundiverse, but these duct tape approaches to guiding players show an inability to make naturally intuitive gameplay. A lot of old adventure games are unintuitive, but some of them have engaging narratives, clever writing, or a fascinating world. This one doesn’t. I zoned out whenever Buddy McGuy was telling me my mission objective. Did I miss the thrilling adventure? Did Samantha’s rival do anything? Was there any significance to the roses outside of being MacGuffins? It's empty storytelling like this that cultivates a dead environment. It is at times livened up by a few bright colors and fun puzzles, but mostly just feels like a mediocre picture book. The game's trivial weirdness is more memorable than its main plot. Why is gold used as a distraction by making noise instead of being valuable? Why is a paperweight (which could look like anything) a hidden object and why is it used to break glass? Why is the Japanese object that is clearly a shamisen called "instrument?" I should keep things in perspective. This isn’t a terrible game; I came out of it a lot happier than I had with similar games, and I think someone who knows what they’re getting into buying this on sale will be reasonably satisfied. I maintain, however, that this genre has potential, maybe not in spades, but enough that is clearly being squandered by developers focusing on accessibility over innovation.

Thumbs down! This game has problems running under Windows 10. I got it to work by using dgVoodoo, but only in a windowed mode, not fullscreen. This is a big drawback for a hidden object game (HOG) since it makes the hidden objects much harder to spot.

This game is something that my Grandfather and I bonded over when it first came out. Hide and Seek games will always be special with me, especially this one.