[h1]Sea Legends: Phantasmal Light – Collector's Edition[/h1]
...is a hidden object game. After you ship got caught in a strange storm with glowing symbols in the sky, you wake up on the shore of an island and find that your spouse was captured and dragged to a mysterious old lighthouse.
[h1]⚠ [u]Description[/u][/h1]
For those unfamiliar with the genre, you play on static scenes or panels, from which paths branch, sometimes in several directions. On each panel, there are things you can observe (if the mouse cursor is a magnifying glass), interact with or pick up for later use.
The genre namesake hidden object puzzles consists of a screenful of clutter objects: a shoe, an apple, a frog, a sword, a bottle, etc., from which you must find a specific list of 12 objects. Some objects, marked in blue in the list, require an interaction, such as moving another unrelated object or opening a container to be revealed.
Almost every door, box or chest require some form of puzzle to open. These can be observation puzzles such as images needing to be reconstructed by moving tiles around, or logic-based puzzles with a mechanism needing to be manipulated. Other simply need the use of a key or items (a screwdriver or a crowbar, for instance). And yet others a combination of both, such as a mechanical lock which is missing parts before you can try to crack it.
[h1]☺ [u]Pros[/u][/h1]
I found the game to have a very decent quantity of hidden object puzzles. Each of the hand-drawn scenes seamlessly blended the items to be found with the static background, so you couldn't just guess which items were removable. When a puzzle had to be redone a second time (with a different list of objects to be found), the previously removed items were returned to keep the clutter sufficiently dense.
While the story isn't anything to write home about, the game captured the expected otherworldliness I expected, with strange and spooky areas, unsettling animations, and an OK voice acting. You even get a short bonus mission upon completing the game where you experience the same events from a different person's point of view.
[h1]☹ [u]Cons[/u][/h1]
[i]Sea Legends: Phantasmal Light[/i] is very badly optimized for modern PCs. I've had it sitting in my Steam inventory for a while, and upon recently hearing it was rereleased by its publisher, I expected a decent resolution or at the very least widescreen compatibility. What I found was a blurry, ugly game, stretched horizontally. I had to move it down to window mode to even attempt at enjoying the visuals, uncovering its 1024x768 resolution the likes of which I had on my computer 20 years ago.
Puzzles of other varieties are few and unimaginative, unchallengeing at best, tedious at worst. There is terrible backtracking at times, the game ending on the sour note of picking up an object from the very end of the panel branch, going all the way back to the very first panel to place the object, then having to once again go all the way to the last panel to redo the same puzzle a second time to get a second object, and travel back once more. Oh, and there are two endings defined by the very last puzzle, they don't tell you which choice does what, and the game expects you to redo it enterly to find out that the second ending is a mere 3-second difference in the last cutscene.
[h1][b]Verdict[/b]: ★★☆☆☆ - [i]"Forget it."[/i][/h1]
What we have here is a terribly average hidden object game, with absolutely nothing unique, nothing that differentiates it from other, much better or modern-looking games out there. If you got it from a bundle, give it a go, but it isn't worth actually spending money to acquire this title.
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[i][b]This was just my opinion.[/b]
If you found this review helpful, please consider giving it a thumbs up, and feel free to check out more of my (purely opinionated) [url=http://steamcommunity.com/groups/CJsOpinions/]reviews[/url].[/i]
