Enigmatis: The Ghosts of Maple Creek

It’s another Artifex Mundi title and the first one that gave me any real trouble. Playing through the game on expert for the first time when it doesn’t tell you where to go is one thing but the items and what they were used for were absolutely ridiculous for the most part.

I’ve started to be sensible now too knowing that I’m probably going to play all of their games, I bought this one as part of a bundle with Enigmatis 2: The Mists of Ravenwood which I’ll be playing next and will be the first direct sequel from the publishers I’ll play.

The game follows the story of a detective with amnesia after a car crash looking for another missing woman (shocking, I know.) She is in the town of Maple Creek where an evil priest is trying to do something with women to gain some power or something. I don’t know; it’s not really explained but basically the job is to save the woman from the evil priest.

There were a few things that happened during this game that made me laugh. Firstly and in relation to the storyline, despite the appearance of there being a desperate race to save this woman, you can spend as long as you want dicking about. And if you are playing on expert, you will do this going backwards and forwards trying to find the relevant scene you need to explore to find that one item with its specific use to allow you to progress. There is no penalty for taking too long which makes sense in the context of the game but not if reality was applied.

Secondly, you have an amazing carry capacity when reality is applied. At one point you pick up a chainsaw and then run through the forest with it but if you think about it, you could have the detective running backwards and forwards looking for a hidden picture scene carrying a chainsaw. Unless she is some kind of faceless cyborg from the future, I’m pretty sure she would collapse after a few hours of lugging that thing around.

The last thing is the fact that at so many points during the game, you get items that have specific purposes which you can’t use even if you come across a situation where the item would be appropriate to use because it’s not the specific one. A couple of examples, you need to use a fishing pole to get a page out of a tree but you can’t use it to get a cork out of a drain. You have to use acid to melt some rusty metal but a hammer would have done the job just as well. The whole game is like that too - when you think you have what you need only for it to not be what you need and you need to traipse around all over the place looking for that one elusive item you missed at the beginning.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 11 Achievements

There are only hidden picture scenes here so there is no need for a second playthrough however there are 8 missable achievements. There are only two for just completing the game but the likelihood is you will get more than this without the use of a guide.

Finishing all the hidden pictures and puzzles without skipping any will net you 4 of the missables. Then there are the usual speed ones for a mini-game in under a minute, hidden scene in under a minute and three items in three seconds as well as the customary ‘complete a scene with less than 4 mistakes’ – so no major shakes for the missables either.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Enigmatis was an enjoyable, funny, sometimes frustrating experience but did actually feel a little rewarding playing through on expert without a guide. Some of the puzzles were hard but never illogical which is still the strongest credit to the series.

Clockwork Tales: Of Glass and Ink

The next Artifex Mundi game to fall by the wayside is Clockwork Tales: Of Glass and Ink. You play as Evelyn Glass who is searching for professor Ambrose Ink, a guy who is researching something to do with earthquakes in a bizarre Neo-Nazi snow covered town. It’s a bit different from the previous Mundi games in that you actually find Professor Ink at the beginning of the game... only for him to be kidnapped by the Nazis and you have to find him all over again.

You are not alone on the rescue quest – you are joined by Matthew, a mechanical bird who will help you get items from hard to reach places. He doesn’t have much of a carry capacity though and most of his help results in him knocking stuff off of high shelves for you to then pick up. 

As with previous games, there are hidden picture scenes but this time, there is no alternative game to play instead. You will, however, come across different types of hidden picture scenes where you have to use various items you find within the scene in a sort of puzzle format in order to get one item at the end... I realise I’ve probably made that sound more complicated than it is.

Musically and graphically it works well where the music doesn’t annoy or get in the way. In fact, I can’t really remember the music much which is only a good thing.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 18 Achievements

With the lack of an additional mini-game means that there is no need for an additional playthough of the game unless you miss some of the missable achievements – which I still managed to do but it wasn’t too bad for me luckily. You will get 9 achievements for just playing through the game. 10 if you do so in expert difficulty – which once again doesn’t make the game more difficult, simply drags out how long it will take you to complete without a guide.

You’ve then got the now standard missables for getting to the end without skipping any puzzles and completing a hidden object scene - this time without making any mistakes - however there are some additional bits to Clockwork Tales.

In most scenes, you will be able to find things call Steambugs. These are mechanical bugs that serve no purpose other than to be in the game as a set of collectibles and there are four achievements associates with them. You have to find one of them and then you have to find all of them spread over three locations.

I got lucky here as I missed one in the first location in the game so I only had to replay the first tiny bit rather than all of it.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Overall it does exactly what you would expect an Artifex Mundi title to do by this point – more of the same with some slight differences to add to the mechanics. The collectibles offer a new angle to full completion in terms of achievements. I’ve now started playing these games in the order they were released and this is the second title they put out after Nightmares from the Deep so there may be more titles out there with collectibles.

Nightmares from the Deep: The Cursed Heart

So after enjoying Dark Arcana: The Carnival, I thought I would give this one a go too. It wasn’t on sale or anything which shows how much I rated the first game I played.

Nightmares from the Deep follows the story of a mother and daughter who are looking to put together a museum exhibition of Captain Remmington, a notorious pirate from the past who supposedly had some kind of devil powers. This becomes apparent when his corpse reanimates and he kidnaps the daughter to perform a sacrifice to bring back his dead lover. Sound familiar?

The game is similar to Dark Arcana in that you have to search hidden object scenes to find items to help you on your quest however there are a few differences. In Nightmares, you play Mahjong instead of Monaco. This was a bit better and it felt more like a game. It’s still not as good as actually doing the hidden scenes though. The other thing which I liked was that some items you could use MORE THAN ONCE!! How novel that I could use a useful item on more than one occasion! Why this didn’t apply to some of the more obviously useful items, like a crowbar for example, I still don’t know.

Some of the puzzles were really good too. A lot of them require you to find various items before you can progress to the actual puzzle. Once again they offer a challenge without being too obscure to be solveable – a major plus point, especially over that bullshit Mr Pumpkin Adventure.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 15 Achievements

In terms of achievements there are only three that are related to the main story. Four if you include playing it through on expert mode. I was clued up this time and aware that I needed to do two playthroughs so started it on normal to learn what needed to happen first.

There are the normal achievements to expect now for finishing a hidden picture scene in less than a minute, without making mistakes and without skipping any puzzles - which is essentially not playing the game. Once you finish the first playthrough doing hidden picture scenes and puzzles, you should only have the Mah-jong achievements left, and the expert difficulty if you played on casual first.

One of these Mah-jong achievements is the hardest achievement in the game and it’s for completing a game of Mah-jong in less than a minute. The trick for Monaco from Dark Arcana goes one further here. What I had to do was complete the hidden picture scene, then once I picked the last object, quickly switch to Mah-jong. This tricks the game in to thinking you have completed a game of Mah-jong and unlocks the achievement.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Despite the shitty Mah-jong, Nightmares from the Deep is still another solid game. It took me just over eight hours to complete the game from start to finish so clocks in at about a £1 an hour in terms of fun pounds.

Mr Pumpkin Adventure

I’ve been looking for reasons to spend my American store currency as I swear there were more region locked titles when I got the gift card but this is only the second title I’ve managed to find on the store.

Unfortunately, it’s an absolute pile of shit. I only spent an hour and a bit playing it because I realised it was pile of shit ten minutes into it. I then had some doubts about whether I was right and that I simply didn’t get it so I went online to check some other reviews. These concurred with my opinion so I’ll stick with that for the remainder of the review – Mr Pumpkin Adventure is a pile of shit.

Mr Pumpkin Adventure starts badly with its grammatically poor title. It is Mr Pumpkin’s adventure or Mr Pumpkin goes on an adventure? Who knows but basically you start in Mr Pumpkin’s house and then a load of shit happens that doesn’t make a lot of sense.

It’s supposed to be some kind of puzzle game but the puzzles range in difficulty from normal, to easy, to stupid, to ridiculous, to ‘what the fuck was I even supposed to do there?’ I’ll be honest, I gave up even trying to solve these things by myself after half an hour and just solutioned my way through to the end to cut down on the amount of punishment i was giving myself.

The graphics are garbage and the music is awful too.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 13 Achievements

Achievements wise, there are a few bits to do which dictate which way you play the game. There are nine chapters but only the first six are necessary to get an ending. You need to get all three endings to 100% the game. As you have to get all the endings, tactical saves are required at the beginning of chapters 6 and 7 so you get both ways out of these levels.

In addition to the multiple ending achievements, there will be diary pages hidden throughout the levels. There are four in each level and an achievement is given for collecting all diary pages for all chapters.

Out of the 13 achievements, that just leaves one more which is awarded for completing a mini game to get a hint. This was actually the only thing about the game which was good in terms of an original premise – having to earn hints. I reckon that if I played the game properly, I would have had to abuse this which would no doubt lead me to hating it in the end.

Downloadable Content – N/A

I’m not sure what Mr. Pumpkin Adventure was trying to do as a game. It’s something I will be moving on very quickly from and trying to block out of my mind. I can’t make any recommendations other than to avoid it like the plague.

Dark Arcana: The Carnival

Following the sizeable completion that was Mafia II and my ongoing battle with ESO (Probably never to be completed) I decided to take some time investigating some more relaxing games. During this investigation, I stumbled across Developers Artifex Mundi who have released several Point and Click adventure games. I’ve been waiting for a while for one of their titles to go on sale so I can try them out and Dark Arcana: The Carnival was the first reduced title so I jumped on it.

Dark Arcana follows the story of an unnamed investigator who is looking for a woman who goes missing in a carnival. The investigation leads to Jim something, a knife thrower from the 70s who accidentally killed his lover performing a trick. He is trying to resurrect her but in actual fact he is being tricked by the Evil One who is trying to break into our world to destroy us all. The storyline is hilarious in its wildness and really plays on the fantasy behind the carnival. It’s actually really well executed too and adds value to finishing the game.

The gameplay can be broken down into two categories; puzzles and hidden picture scenes or Monaco. The puzzles very nearly achieve that measure of being challenging while not impossible and what I love about them is that some of them employ elements of common sense for you to solve them. A nice little touch is when you are unlocking a door you have to click to put the key in, click again to turn the key, again to remove the padlock and again to open the door. It’s one of those things where I can imagine a player clicking on the door, having it not open and then getting upset.

The hidden picture scenes are the best bit. I am guilty of having wasted several hours on application games and Facebook games because of my secret love affair with hidden picture scenes, so having an Xbox game where I can earn achievements for doing them was awesome. Instead of doing the hidden picture scenes, you have the option of playing a really shitty card game called Monaco. I didn’t really get the point of this one if I’m honest. It’s basically snap on a 3 by 4 grid where the cards have to be next to each other for you to make matches. There’s no real skill in manipulating the grid and it’s slow and unrewarding.

Another thing that I wasn’t keen on – but do understand – is that the items you can use during the adventure pointlessly break or disappear after one use. This feels annoying when you get, say a hammer, use it to break something, then come across something else that needs breaking only to not have a hammer anymore – a seemingly useful item – gone for no reason!

Musically, they have gone for a sinister backdrop for most of the game but sometimes the pace increases for no reason and it feels really out of sync with what you are doing. The graphics feel like you are within a comic book and this is very suitable for the gameplay style which is great as it doesn’t sacrifice gameplay for graphics.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 22 Achievements

On to the fun bits – there are six achievements for playing through the story of the game and the bonus chapter, and another for completing the game on expert mode. Now this is where I fell down in terms of making it easy for myself.

You need to play through the game twice to get all the achievements but I didn’t check this and just kicked off on expert mode straight away. In expert mode, the game doesn’t give you any indications of where to go and what scenes you need to go to in order to progress. I stubbornly ploughed through the game when in reality, playing it through on casual first would have made the whole thing a lot easier.

There are a lot of missable achievements too and this is where the two playthoughs come in. You have to do all hidden picture scenes as hidden pictures and you also have to play all the scenes as Monaco. For Monaco you have to complete three games without shuffling which is relatively straight forward although it does depend on luck. You also have to finish a game in less than a minute which I think is impossible due to how slow the cards move. What I did was play the game as a hidden picture scene until I only had one item left to find then switched to Monaco and finished the game. Thankfully, this counts as completing a game of Monaco in less than a minute.

Playing hidden picture scenes, you have to do the same things but also find 3 objects in 3 seconds and find all objects in all pictures without using hints. You also have to complete a scene making less than 5 mistakes but this is simple if you can actually find the objects and don’t just randomly click everywhere.

Outside of this there were 3 achievements that I missed on my initial playthough. One was for witnessing the evil world trying to take over ours and to do this you have to not go in the right direction at a specific point. You have to finish a puzzle in less than 15 seconds which is easy on the claw machine at the beginning but I inexplicably fucked this up and had to replay it. The last one was for completing the shooting mini game first time and this is really stupid because you need to know what you need to do before you do it in order to get it right. Again.

Downloadable Content – N/A

I enjoyed Dark Arcana for what it offered in terms of story and gameplay. It’s also decent value for money at £7.99 (RRP) and doesn’t outstay its welcome. It took me just over six hours to complete the entire game and not a moment of it was dull. Even a second playthough didn’t feel like an arduous task. I will definitely be trying out some of their other titles.

Mafia II

Bit of story to this one. It was a Games with Gold title a ways back and I downloaded it on to the Xbox 360 with every intention of playing it. I was then told by certain gaming friends that the game’s downloadable content was to be removed from the marketplace and that the only way to 100% the game was to get the Xbox Classics version which has the DLC included. I’ve now completed the game but for all intents and purposes the DLC is still there on the marketplace so I didn’t need to buy a copy of the game that I already had for free. For fuck’s sake.

Anyway Mafia II has us following the story of Vito Scaletta, a guy that seems set on a having a life of crime, but then gets arrested, gets conscripted, gets injured, gets illegally discharged, decides to have a non-crime related life, lifts one box in a warehouse, thinks ‘fuck this, crime is better!’ and thus starts the adventure of Mafia II.

Along for the ride is Joe Barbaro, the guy your mother warned you about who basically goes around starting trouble and gets Vito involved. What I do admire about Vito though, is his no nonsense attitude to getting stuff done. Hey Vito, go here and steal that car.  ‘Ok’. Hey Vito, here’s a gun in case you need to kill some dudes when you do. ‘Ok – and I’ll make sure I kill at least twenty dudes while I do it.’ He’s the ideal Mafia henchman which plays directly into your hands as the player.

Gameplay wise it’s fairly solid although my major criticism is the structure of the game. You have to play through chapters which take place at certain points in time but the world is a sandbox with no side missions. You basically just go from point A to point B and carry out whatever mission you are tasked with. The sandbox element to the game is almost totally redundant.

Another thing that was negative was the music as well. While I appreciate that it’s the fifties, there really is no need to have the same five songs playing over and over again on the radio. Although Dean Martin’s Ain’t That a Kick in the Head is pretty darn good. The rest of it can suck my dick.

Achievements – 1,500 Points – 67 Achievements

Despite the linearity of the main game, the achievement list is quite varied. There are 22 achievements for the main story and some really annoying ones that aren’t triggered by anything from the main story but will need to be done in certain missions to get them. The first one of these is in chapter 2 where two people are having an argument over a broken down car at the side of the road. You have to wait for the two people to stop arguing and when the guy storms off, help the woman fix her car. The first time, I walked past this, thinking it was no more than an interesting piece of environment activity, seeing as the last time I tried to talk to someone, they basically told me to fuck off and mind my own business.

Another one which was fuckery was for helping a certain character at a certain part of the story escape from his house without getting caught. It’s another one of those ‘you need to know what to do before you can do it’ ones and considering the game continues on whether you fail or not, replaying this is a pain in the ass.

There are loads of bits that you have to do which require you to go out of your way during gameplay. There is one for getting 5 headshots in quick succession and the easiest way to get it is to replay a bit with a machine gun from a window. There are no scoped rifles in the game to up accuracy so this really felt like pot luck. Robbing 5 stores in 5 minutes is another thing that you have to do just for the achievement and no real gain.

There are others but these are my picks for annoyingness. The harder one is for surviving ten minutes at the maximum wanted level but there is an exploitable glitch where you can park in the car crusher and the police can’t get you.

Now for the big ones. You have to drive in 30 different vehicles but the game doesn’t track which ones, only how many different vehicles you have been in. This would have been easier if I had downloadable the DLC first as it gives you eight cars in your garage but I managed to do it without this after climbing through several cars that all look the same.

The last two achievements see you getting collectibles and this is where the chapter layout of the story can go fuck itself. There are playboy magazines and wanted posters that you need to collect spread throughout the sandbox world. The wanted posters are fine but the playboy magazines are specific to in-game chapters. This means that if even if you did what I did and do a hard playthrough from the off, you will still need a partial second playthrough to get the magazines (unless you used a guide for the first playthrough) rather than just roaming roads at your leisure to pick them up. I still don’t get the reason for this.

Downloadable Content

There are two DLCs that carry achievements for this game; Jimmy’s Revenge and Joe’s Adventures. Jimmy’s revenge is the fucker here as it requires you to kill 1,000 enemies and drive for 1,000 miles in the DLC. This is basically horrendous grinding as you will only get around 300 odd kills playing through the missions and you will only drive around a paltry 100 miles.

Thankfully, there is another exploitable glitch where you can drive through a shop window and fall through the floor of the game. This will get you another achievement for amassing 1,000,000 points in the arcade style game but also it accumulates miles very slowly. I had to leave my Xbox on overnight for several nights grinding this out.

Joe’s Adventures, which I played second, is much more forgiving in comparison. Half of the achievements are story related and out of the other five, only one of these is a pain in that you have to get 10 different score actions in the same mission. It takes a bit of planning but it’s nothing compared to driving 1,000 miles for NOTHING.

Mafia II was pretty great up until the point of finishing the main game. The DLC didn’t really add anything other than pissing off achievement hunting gamers and to be honest, didn’t really add a lot of extra story. Still, it felt like a rewarding completion add a welcome addition to the 100% club.

Quantum Break

I had heard a lot of good things about Quantum Break and was also blessed by having a friend who owned it and was in no rush to play it. I borrowed it and played through the game in about a week and I think it is probably the most fun I’ve had with a game in a while.

Quantum Break follows the story of Jack (because no other name can be used for a male protagonist these days) Joyce and Paul Serene (Littlefinger from Game of Thrones) as they get caught up with a time travel experiment. Essentially Paul gets a time machine to work but when testing it he causes a fracture in time. Jack then goes on a mission to stop Paul and fix the fracture caused by their experiment. I won’t say anymore about the story but it was very enjoyable despite some of the flaws with the time travelling.

The story also worked on another level as it made the majority of the characters likeable. Jack does have some in-game one-liners which he continuously pulls out but this didn’t annoy me half as much as in other games but this is part of the gameplay rather than the actual story element.

Gameplay wise, it’s a cover based shooter where Jack will take cover by standing next to something he can take cover behind without you initialising the cover-taking. It’s a bit weird as sometimes I felt like the game wanted me to take bullets to the face by not taking cover when I thought it should. Aside from bang, bang, shooty fun, you also have a collection of time distorting powers which you can use against your enemies. This adds a unique twist to the combat.

The one criticism I have of the gameplay is that the cursor is really hard to see. It’s a third person shooter so if you can’t see the cursor then there is little hope in being able to aim at dudes from the off. It took me a little getting used to but I found that the cursor became more visible the more I played the game.

Alongside the main game, there is a series of TV episodes which work as an accompaniment. I did find this quite funny though as the main actors from the game (Aiden Gillen, Dominic Monaghan and Shawn Ashmore) only make cameo appearances and most of the work is left to the lesser known names. Interestingly, IMDb lists it as having four episodes with no end date which implies there could be a sequel.

The game is graphically brilliant. I even had someone comment that they thought I was watching something instead of playing a game so there is a serious credit to how good it looks.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 42 Achievements

The game has 42 achievements, 15 of which are obtained from playing the game from start to finish. There is a difficulty based achievement for getting through the entire game on hard and this did have me raising my eyebrows at the beginning. As I mentioned earlier, I couldn’t shoot for toffee but while I was trying to get used to the aiming mechanics, I didn’t actually die despite Jack taking more bullets that a Thai hooker takes cocks.

All the way through the game this continued until I got to some snipers which actually required me to be careful and I started wondering how many bullets can Jack take on easy mode? This became apparent when I got to the final fight of the game. The last fight is a joke. All cover goes out of the window and you basically have to run around taking bullets and shooting guys whenever you can. If you stand still, you will die from what I can only describe as an area effect spell. Essentially you have to not do what you’ve been doing for the entire game and run around being shot at instead of using cover. If Jack couldn’t take bullets the way he does throughout the rest of the game, this fight would be next to impossible.

There are multiple choice moments at the end of each in-game act where you the choice you make depends on which achievement you unlock. These aren’t really missable though as you can do Chapter replay and the chapters which the choices are really short.

There are also loads of collectibles throughout the game. These can be put into three categories. There are media items which add to the story if you choose to read them all; quantum ripples which cause small changes to the episodes if you find them in the act preceding the episode; and Chronon Sources which allow you to upgrade all of your powers. There is an achievement for fully upgrading all of your powers which means you need to collect all of these.

There are seven achievements associated with repeating certain actions mostly associated with using your time powers a certain amount of times. The hardest ones though are for destroying 15 Chronon harnesses and for using environmental objects to blow up enemies. I did manage to get both of these while doing a collectibles playthough which was a relief as I normally need to grind out stuff like environmental kills.

And that’s pretty much it, the last achievement I got was for collecting all of the media items and this is where the game has a little wobble. Some people have reported that this achievement does not unlock when it should and the tracker gets stuck at 100%. You can see this happened to me as my profile shows me fully completing Quantum Break 2 minutes before I unlocked this one. Bizarrely, the work around involves opening Quantum Break’s achievement page inside the Xbox menus so you don’t have actually have to be in the game to get the achievement. It’s almost like an in-joke.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Quantum Break is a really solid game that offers something slightly new to the gaming industry. It seems to do everything right as well providing a healthy balance between story and gameplay. Even the achievements are fairly balanced where someone striving for 100% percent completion will still have fond memories after finishing it.