Dark Lore Mysteries: The Hunt For Truth

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Dark Lore Mysteries: The Hunt for Truth

MSRP: $4.99

Platforms: Windows

Release: 4/8/14

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Upon starting up Dark Lore Mysteries: The Hunt for Truth, I thought for a moment that this was the first hidden object game I’d played put out by Gogii Games.  Then, I took a glance at their catalog, and realized I had played games from them before – they just weren’t that memorable.  The best news you can take away from that is that none of them were awful – bad games tend to stick in my mind even longer than good ones. But they weren’t really good games either, and this one is equally mediocre.

Hidden object games are not noteworthy for their storytelling, so really, if the tale is coherent, that’s pretty much good enough for me.  Where they tend to succeed or fail is on the quality and number of hidden object scenes and other puzzles.  Try to cram in too many cutscenes and exposition pieces with an average story, and your target audience is going to get bored.

While there’s nothing wrong with the hidden object scenes, there’s nothing particularly challenging going on either.  I’ve been spoiled with games that require you to combine pieces or move things in order to reveal all the objects. Here, they all seem to be of the find-12-things-and-profit style. The puzzles I’ve encountered so far feel like they can all be solved with enough random clicking, which frankly, makes them less satisfying to solve.

Which leads to what feels like – at least to me – to be the biggest failure in Dark Lore Mysteries: The Hunt for Truth: the flow is absolutely awful.  After having issues figuring out the next step more than once on the harder difficulty, I restarted the game on easy, and discovered that my issue was much the same. Although I have no doubt I could have powered my way through it, I just didn’t see any reason to. The puzzles and hidden object scenes were too easy for me, and figuring out what to do in between was frustrating and often seemed illogical when I chose to go for a hint. This would be a flaw in any game in the genre, but it’s compounded when it feels like the rest of the game was designed for someone new to the genre.

In a week, I’ll have completely forgotten the time I spent with this game.  In a month, I’ll notice in my Steam library and wonder if I played it yet.  Although it’s nice to see someone putting out games in the hidden object genre for a more reasonable price, I don’t know that it’s worth it if the games we get are like Dark Lore Mysteries: The Hunt for Truth.