This wins the prize for the most frustrating DS game that I have ever played! Why? All will be revealed shortly.
The blurb made the game sound interesting, spanning settings across France, China, Egypt, Rome and so on. It’s basically a hidden object game once again with the added twist of ‘casting spells’.
In addition to finding listed objects, you need to find frogs, eyes, jewels and feathers, which combine to make ‘spells’. What you actually do is join some dots to make a shape, releasing a hint, some extra time or whatever. Drawing the shapes becomes very tedious and several times I got over-enthusiastic and started to draw too early, failing the task, which meant I had to repeat it – maddening!
You are also meant to collect jigsaw pieces throughout the game, but I often forgot to look for these.
The first few levels were fine to play, some things were a bit tricky to find, but it’s boring if you find everything easily anyway. But then I got to the Sacrificial Altar level and things started to get very frustrating.
I spent ages trying to find the numbers and arrows requested, eventually finding the first few, before becoming completely stuck. Even returning to the level over a series of days got me nowhere, partly because the graphics in this scene are not at all clear. In desperation I turned to the Internet for help – something I never normally do. One suggestion was to turn the brightness up on the DS, but this didn’t help me. Another was to use a spell, but either this is only possible on certain versions, or my game had a ‘bug’ preventing me from doing so. In the end I resorted to random tapping, which meant time penalties, but with perseverance and restarting the level several times over I go there in the end. A very haphazard method that I went on to use in another couple of frustrating levels.
Another really annoying thing about this game is that you can only save one version of the game at a time, and when you load story mode ‘new game’ appears top of the list, meaning it’s very easy to click on it by accident as opposed to ‘continue’ and lose all your game so far.
Despite all the setbacks, I managed to get to the end of the game – I must be a glutton for punishment, are you?
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