Knee Deep

The next title in my randomly generated picks is Knee Deep, a game that came with a package of Wales Interactive Games along with the previously reviewed Late Shift.

Knee Deep is a visual novel so just give me a few minutes to find and re-read my Three Fourths Home review… okay done. Knee Deep is somewhat of an improvement over that pile of shite and not just because all of Knee Deep’s achievements unlocked when they were supposed to. It still hasn’t enamoured me to the visual novel genre but did show that Three Fourths Home is a blip even by the genre’s own standards. I wasn’t looking for another visual novel game to play – it was just cheaper to get the other games I wanted in a bundle.

Anyway, Knee Deep is a visual novel game where you are effectively watching a play with actors and you have to make dialogue decisions with three different protagonists – well, technically four but you spend the majority of the game following three of them so we will stick with three.

The story, after having played through the first act three times, is bizarre to the point of stupidity and that’s without going into the dialogue choices. I suppose revealing the end, even if the end makes no sense in its own context, is a spoiler so here is the warning.

What starts out as a murder investigation turns into exposing a political cover up. But in a dramatic twist, it turns out the political cover up is just a front for… bringing the dead back to life. In the form of a half-zombie. And then the town is swallowed by a sink hole. You can’t make this stuff up. Although, Knee Deep’s universe is proof that you actually can.

Turning to the characters themselves and the dialogue options, each of the three characters you control has a dialogue trait that allows you to play the game as a total freak. Romana can just say something strange in response to stuff, Jack can make belligerent comments and KC can make cynical comments. This was actually quite good at first but on multiple playthroughs, it gets exposed.

You are told as the start of the game that you cannot ‘lose’ but your choices change how people react to you. This is true in mini segments. You can be as strange or belligerent towards people as you want but they will inevitably go back to a fixed track dialogue that’s so lazily done, it makes no sense half the time. An example of this is when Romana makes strange comments, some people call her weird whereas others just churn out their pre-determined speech as if saying ‘Pineapple’ for no reason is perfectly normal.

Gameplay wise, there isn’t a lot. There are four, maybe five, bits where you have to do the computer game equivalent of a mini jigsaw puzzle but that’s it. The rest is incessantly clicking through endless, and sometimes pointless dialogue.

The game also had a few glitches when I played. Sometimes a puzzle would start and the game would move on in the background and characters would talk over what was happening. On one of my subsequent playthroughs, when I skipped some dialogue, the character didn’t seem to like this and just carried on talking anyway.

The menus and dialogue selections are very clunky too. It felt like the game wasn’t ready for me to press buttons at certain points and I would have to press a button twice to select a dialogue choice or wiggle the analogue stick a lot to see if the menu was active. And even then, there was no guarantee the cursor would move to where I wanted it to go. It felt a lot like poor design.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 43 Achievements

All of the achievements can be put into three categories. Story Related; Multiple Pathways and continuous selection.

There are 16 achievements for running through the game from start to finish and you will get some of the multiple-choice ones as you do.

Turning to the continuous selection ones, there are 9 achievements here. With your three characters, you have to select strange, cynical or belligerent dialogue options at every opportunity. If you don’t miss any, all 6 will unlock by the end of the second act. There are 2 achievements for each character. The bigger pain in the ass are the other three. You make reports as you play the game that show the public what’s happening in the story and these reports can either be cautious, edgy or inflammatory. You have to continuously select the same style of report to get three separate achievements associated with the styles. Thankfully this only applies to the first act. I think I would have killed myself if I had to play through the full game three times.

The other multiple pathways ones can all be obtained by leaving to the main menu after the first achievement unlocks and reloading. This is only really necessary in Act III since you have to play Act I three times anyway and there are no missables in Act II. The most notable ones for these involve taking an Opto test as both Romana and Jack. There are three outcomes for each character and you have to get all three for six achievements. Jack also has a belligerent response instead of taking the test so this one is actually 4 choices.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Knee Deep was a straight forward game completion that I did actually enjoy for the first couple of hours. It’s funny in places too but the dialogue inconsistencies and pretentious nature of some of the humour somewhat zapped my enjoyment. The last two partial playthroughs were not fun either. Still, for the achievement hunters, it’s an effortless 100%.

Nightmares from the Deep 3: Davy Jones

Now this really is the last Artifex Mundi game I will play for a while as there are currently no more remaining on the marketplace. I suspect there will be another few released as soon as this is published though.

Artifex Mundi have recently come under fire from the gaming community for upping the prices of their games. They have done this retrospectively too which is unusual, but again highlights why buying when the price is right is a good idea. There were a load of comments on a forum I was reading essentially saying how people weren’t going to buy their games and how their games are not worth the price hike. To put this into perspective, the UK prices when up from £8.99 to £11.99 – an increase of £3. That is about two loaves of bread for something that you keep for ever. This has been dressed up by describing it in terms of percentages. Saying there has been an increase of 33% seems extortionate – but if you increase the price from £1 to £2 that’s a 100% increase… but still not expensive.

What I’m trying to say is, I don’t understand the ire of the public on this. If you are a gamer you are doing something you don’t need to do to survive. If you don’t like the price of a game, don’t buy it. But at least have the sense to identify that Artifex Mundi are a business and need to make money to continue making games. On the flip side, if they didn’t raise the prices, people would be crying their eyes out that Artifex Mundi went out of business and no longer make any games. Also, the amount people saying, ‘I’ll just wait for a sale’ aren’t really supporting the gaming industry. If everyone got everything for free, there wouldn’t be a gaming industry to start with – then you’d have to find something else to complain about.

Anyway, on to the actual game review now I’ve got the padding out of the way. Davy Jones puts you back in the pants of Mrs Black, Artifex Mundi’s most notorious protagonist. After trying to deliver a presentation on Davy Jones, Davy Jones takes exception to this, smashes a hole in the museum and kidnaps Mrs Black and her daughter. He is going to make Mrs Black walk the plank when the daughter, the smartest character in gaming history, asks Captain Jones not to kill her and says she will do anything to save her mother. She signs some kind of deal thing and Mrs Black gets thrown in the ocean anyway. Davy Jones didn’t kill her, he tried to let the sea do it instead. Ha. Ha… Ha. ‘I pushed you into the shark tank but it was the shark that killed you, not me.’ Such tosh logic… but it’s typical pirate logic, I suppose.

Anyway, Mrs Black doesn’t die as Davy Jones knocks a rowing boat in the water, initially to prevent you from escaping, and Mrs Black lives to solve puzzles and hidden picture scenes to save her dumbass daughter from the even dumber Davy Jones and break the curse once and for all.

The gameplay is the same as we’ve already seen from these titles so I’ll talk about the story some more. The daughter is a real dick throughout. Stupid at the beginning and moronic later on. There is a point in the story, even though she is effectively Davy Jones’ prisoner, she acts like she is bored and just wants to go home. I mean, really? I know there is no time constraints on the life or death situations but my god, at least act like your life is in peril.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 30 Achievements

Outside of the main body of the standard Artifex Mundi style achievements, there are collectibles to be had and lots of them. You have to collect 10 pirate cards, 12 seahorses and 24 puzzle pieces. Some of these are quite hard to see so you do have to keep an eye out but unlike other games, you can revisit all the way back to where the first collectible is right up to completing the game. In addition, you also have to interact with 16 different animals on the island. This one is bit tricky as you don’t get a counter for it (you do with the others) and you can miss interactions without even knowing it as some things count and others do not. It’s quite annoying.

The last one I unlocked was for completing games of mah-jong which is the additional game in this title. However, Artifex Mundi seem to have taken their achievement lists seriously and they only require you to play three games instead of all of them. That said, what was also annoying is that you don’t have to play the hidden picture scenes in the bonus adventure for any achievements but the games of mah-jong played in the bonus adventure don’t count towards this achievement. Why?? If they had counted it wouldn’t even require a small partial second playthough – made more frustrating by the fact that there are no hidden picture scenes in the opening 20 minutes of the original adventure!

Downloadable Content – N/A

Davy Jones is an enjoyable Artifex Mundi game and achievements wise, is much improved from earlier Xbox One ports. I will continue to buy their games as long as they remain of the same quality and offer the same style of puzzles. All of the Artifex Mundi games released to date have a total Gamerscore available of 14,000 points – quite the haul for some puzzling fun.

Assassin's Creed Origins

My original plan was to have completed all my other Assassin’s Creed games before Origins was released. However, this was a total pipe dream and I still have Chronicles India and Russia to go as well as The Ezio Collection but that only sort of counts as it’s just more of our favourite Italian assassin and I’ve already done his adventures once.

Assassin’s Creed Origins takes us all the way back to ancient Egypt and puts in the sandals of Bayak of Siwa as he goes on a murderous rampage to avenge his dead son. This is basically the birth of the Assassins versus Templars thing as Bayak keeps killing dudes only to be given more dudes to kill. The story is pretty good and despite some people calling Bayak boring, he is far more engaging that Connor from Assassin’s Creed III and that Arno guy from the forgettable Assassin’s Creed Unity. You also get to play as his love interest Aya for small sections of the game.

The gameplay has caused a lot of people to call Origins a breath of fresh air in the franchise. I get it as it feels a lot more refined than before, but I can’t help but feel that it’s kind of missing the point. Assassins are supposed to be sneaky and kill people silently. While I get that they should be combat ready at all times, the default should be sneaking and the punishment for being detected much more severe. You can kill anyone in any way, shape or form. I was kind of hoping for some more planned assassinations like the first game.

Another notable difference between this and previous games is that instead of Eagle Vision, you now have an actual Eagle who can see stuff for you and identify targets, enemies and chests and allow you to see them. I am assuming at some stage, an assassin will go into some kind of scientific device with said eagle and they will combine to generate the Eagle Vision power we know and love from the franchise. It is incredible that the eagle can supposedly see treasure chests in underground caves but whatever, we’ll run with it.

As well as killing people, there will be lot of optional side quests that pop up for you to help the people of Egypt with their day to day lives. This will also include killing some more dudes at some stages as was the norm in ancient Egypt? It is quite comical how casual Bayak is about killing people for the most inane crimes.

Another good thing about the gameplay is that you can chose the difficulty level to suit your ability.

Egypt is huge. The first area itself is probably the size of one city from Assassin’s Creed II and there were only three cities in that game. There are like twenty areas here. It does suffer a bit from being far too spread out though. There are desert regions in the south where there is nothing to do. Some of the mountainous terrain in the north is a little tricky to navigate quickly through.

I suppose my point here is that if you are going to have a big map, use it a bit more? There is literally no point in having the desert regions in the game, they are just taking up memory. That said there are in excess of 400 locations to explore where you have to complete actions like open treasure chests, kill dudes (obviously), find secret tablets and gaze at the stars.

Graphically the game is stunning. Egypt is beautiful from the pyramids to the oceans and everything in between. The character designs and environments and well thought out and there were few cases of me getting stuck on the scenery. The music offers an ancient Egyptian feel with the familiar twang that’s accustomed to the Assassin’s Creed franchise. It doesn’t overpower but also goes unnoticed for the most part, which is the right balance for in-game music.

Achievements – 1,240 Points – 67 Achievements

I am hoping that Ubisoft are done with this. We are already two DLCs in and Discovery Mode with a nice even 1,500 points.

There are 12 main storyline achievements but you will get a couple more through normal play that don’t warrant going too far off the beaten track. The fact there are those empty deserts at the bottom of the maps means that it is possible to complete the game without defogging the entire map which is a bit weird but there you go.

Outside of the main stuff, it does throws in the usual Assassin’s Creed varied achievements and my word, it doesn’t half want you to do some convoluted shit. The first one of these was feeding a corpse to some animals. First you have to kill a dude (I know, right?) then drag his dead ass across the burning desert in hope of finding some animals that actually want to eat him. Once you’ve done this, you then need to throw the corpse down in a place where the animals will go without them seeing you and then hang around waiting for it to get eaten. Stupid.

Killing three enemies with one hit was a pain too but I foolishly tried to get this one at the beginning of the game when my weapons were shit. In the later game I had one weapon that killed everyone with one swing so this is actually a lot easier than I made it for myself.

Another fun one makes you tame a lion (you need to have acquired the skill from the skill tree) and then lead said lion to a crocodile and make them fight. This is made hard by the fact that you cannot fast travel with a lion so you have to wander the wastes of Egypt looking for a crocodile while your trusty lion follows you.

The one achievement I needed to grind out was for killing dudes (again) by firing fire arrows into oil and setting them on fire. You need to do this 30 times but there are not a lot of opportunity and also normally you have to fire arrows through fire into oil to do it. You can, however, get legendary bows which have automatic fire arrows which makes this easier.

There are another three achievements worth mentioning. You need to sell 100 trinkets at once. Trinkets are useless items that you find in pots and stuff as you search places. There appears to be a limited number of these so you need to save them up to get it. DLCs may help in making this easier to get in the future.

The one which annoyed me is for witnessing raining bugs in the desert. This means you have to run Bayak through the desert regions of Africa until he starts hallucinating. Once he starts, it’s totally random what he will see. Raining bugs is one of many hallucinations Bayak could see. Some people have reported not seeing this for several hours. What happened to me was that I saw it not once but twice without getting the achievement. I then restarted the game and it unlocked so this was one of the rare occasions where the game glitched on me and this could be an Xbox issue rather than a game issue.

The last one is the big one and it’s for clearing every location in the game. This is straight forward for the most part but also time consuming and there is one thing that nearly fucked me here too. When you are exploring certain locations, there are yellow crystals called silica that you need to pick up to complete the area. However, make sure you pick all of them up. The last location of these types requires 50 silica to complete it so if you rush through like I did and not pick them up, you will have to revisit these areas to get the missing silica.

I also had that annoying collectible issue where I was missing about four locations and had that, ‘is this the last one??’ moment when trying to find them. Pro tip for this – the map is too bright. Lower the in-game brightness right down and it will make finding those missing locations a damn sight easier – they show up on the map as question marks if you haven’t found them yet.

Downloadable Content

There are three DLCs. The first one of is a single player expansion called the Hidden Ones. Its not very long and compared to main game, the achievements aren’t that demanding. The most notable ones are for killing three dudes from a zipline, freeing twenty rebels from captivity and jumping off some statue thing between 10 am and 12pm. The reason this last one is tricky is because there is no in game clock. You have to time it based on the shadows in the game.

The second DLC, which is free, is Discovery Tour which allows you to play in a non-combat Egypt and learn all about ancient culture. This is great move that has been really well received by the public. It offers three achievements, all are easy to get it shouldn’t take more than an hour and a half to get them.

The more recently released Curse of the Pharaohs sees Bayak visit Thebes where long dead Pharaohs are coming back to life and killing people. Bayak goes on a quest to stop them and in doing so, stumbles into the afterlife. It’s probably closest to the Tyranny of King Washington DLC from Assassin’s Creed III in that it’s totally out there in terms of fantasy. This is especially the case when you end up fighting a load of giant scorpions.

Curse of the Pharaohs carries another six achievements which are straight forward to get. Thebes and its surrounding area is a lot bigger than the Hidden Ones DLC so it takes a while longer to get them all but when they charge £15.99 for the privilege, I would fucking hope for some extended gameplay. Artifex Mundi games are cheaper than this.

I had a lot of fun with Assassin’s Creed Origins and it’s definitely given me the impetus to complete the franchise. With the DLCs included though it takes up nearly 20% of the hard drive so you don’t want it sitting around forever once installed. In fact, that’s been the most annoying part of the game – having it sit there, waiting for the DLCs to come out.

Achievement wise, it’s very doable and leaves everything in the hands of the single player gamer and offers variety. In this regard, it is a great list to go through.

Arcade Game Series: Dig Dug

After Hue, this is next game picked by friends and I’m not really sure what happened. The number selection process was meant to enable me to get some quick and easy completions off of the list of which there were about twelve. Dig Dug was nowhere near the easy end of the spectrum but more on that later. It did, however, meet the quick completion criteria coming in at under 6 hours.

I got this game with the two other, slightly easier Arcade Game Series games at a discount as part of  package and I will try and get the others completed soon.

Dig Dug is an arcade classic as semi-dictated by the title of the game. The idea is that you are a man and you have to dig through some underground areas to kill some enemies using a pump and inflating them until they explode. Once you’ve killed all but one of the enemies, the last one will try to run away. Either kill or let him escape and you move on to the next level and repeat the process.

Simple right? Well, yes it is if one of the enemy types couldn’t breath fire at you which sometimes goes through walls and sometimes doesn’t. The enemies themselves can also turn into ‘ghosts’ and float through the walls to kill you. In the later levels they will all gank you at once making it nearly impossible to survive for more than a couple of seconds at a time unless you get lucky. I found that once you got to a certain point, the gameplay verged on unfair.

Musically, it’s fucking annoying, there’s no other word for it. Imagine you’re in an arcade surrounded by loads of other machines and kids all screaming at each other – the music will make very little difference. However, take that game out of the arcade and stick it in your living room and play the same music and it becomes almost unbearable to listen to. If you are going to adapt an arcade game for the home console, at least dial down the annoying high-pitched, beepy, non-stop music please.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 20 Achievements

I played the game for about five minutes and four levels before I was killed and then took a look at the achievement list. I was immediately scared that I wouldn’t complete the game at all due to two achievements, one for killing one hundred enemies in a single playthrough and one for digging out 1,000 squares in one game (although the achievement description doesn’t say that.)

However, the good thing about the achievements is that you can unlock them after putting the settings on ‘easy’ which is giving yourself five lives and setting the life rewards to the lowest setting which is one extra life after 20,000 points.

Anyway, on to the achievements and there are two gimmes for completing level 1 and 2. I did this on my first session which locked me in straight away.

In each level are four rocks which can be used to kill enemies and most of the achievements are associated with these rocks. 9 achievements can be earned by dropping two rocks in certain levels to get fruits to appear. Collect the fruits for achievements.

There are another three achievements for the rocks. You need to kill two enemies with one rock and four enemies with one rock. Two is relatively straight forward but four takes a bit of planning. You need to get four enemies to chase you, have a vertical tunnel up to a rock and then move out of the way and cross your fingers that none of them escape. The last one is for killing all enemies in a level with rocks. This is easier in the first level as there are four enemies and four rocks.

There are two easy miscellaneous ones – for killing all enemies without digging – in the first level just wait for them all to come to you – and another for killing an enemy on the surface. When the last enemy escapes, they always go to the surface to do it so you can just wait there for them to pop up and kill them.

The last three are the fuckers and the first one set me up for the last two. The first one involves having to dig out the entirety of the dirt in a level. This is hard for several reasons, the first being that you have to have two enemies alive that you need to avoid as if you kill all bar one, the last one will run away. It’s made harder still by the fact that the enemies get faster the longer you stay alive so they will always get you eventually. And harder still by the fact that digging out columns vertically or horizontally next to each other leaves a small wall of dirt on the map which also needs to be removed. Essentially it boils down to having to move horizontally and vertically through every square on the map.

The good thing about this is that it gave me a chance to develop my survival skills for the last two achievements which I’ve already mentioned at the start. Essentially, it boils down to practice. I will make another note on the controls here though; the analogue stick is overly sensitive and I found myself dying a lot because my dude would turn away from the enemy I was trying to kill. The D Pad removes this issue completely. Another tip which is essential once you start getting to enemies in the same starting locations is that you can approach a wall of dirt, partially dig through it and use your weapon to kill both enemies in the area without presenting yourself as a target. You will have to approach the fire breathing dudes from above or below so they don’t get with the fire though.

Centurion requires you to get to level 15 and clearing it without getting a game over on the assumption that no enemies escape. Good luck. Rambler, for digging through 1,000 spaces of dirt, I’m not sure about because Xbox was having achievement issues when I unlocked it so I don’t know when it popped. However, I got to level 9 when I unlocked it and got an extra life on level 6 for some ideas as to whether you are on track for this. I also nearly entirely cleared the first three levels of dirt on my successful run.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Dig Dug is a tough yet rewarding completion and I got a great deal of satisfaction from unlocking the harder achievements. The controls and cheapness of the game did fuck me off at times but despite this, I managed to get all of it done in less than six hours. Considering it retails at £3.19, that’s not bad value.

Goosebumps: The Game

True Achievements turned 10 years old this month and as part of this event, they threw out a community challenge to spell out HAPPY BIRTHDAY TRUEACHIEVEMENTS using the first letter of the names of achievements. I tried from the outset to do this with my current games in progress – which gave me new hope for completing FIFA 08 or what’s left of it – but I got stuck on the second Y with only a handful of ridiculous or time consuming achievements left in my outstanding list. Enter Goosebumps: The Game with an easy achievement list, and a couple of achievements beginning with the letter Y to boot.

Goosebumps: The Game is a point and click adventure game where you get involved in having to stop all of R.L. Stine’s monsters who have escaped from their book-prisons. There are several really annoying things about playing the game and most of them are to do with navigation.

Every action you take is subject to narrative that appears at the bottom of the screen and prevents you from doing anything until you have clicked through the narrative. It comes up every time, even if you have already read said narrative several times when you need to revisit scenes, or get lost. I get that the game is based on a series of books but I don’t go back and read a previous page when I’m trying to get through the story.

Coupled with this, the navigation is clunky. You can get to new areas by either clicking on the correct corresponding, unmarked part of the screen – which is hard – or you can use the D-Pad. I know right? Something I forgot even exists in this analogue world we live in!

It reminds me a little bit of Discworld in terms of the inventory. You can pick up almost anything you want but that doesn’t mean it is of any use to you. At the end, I had nine pages of inventory which is just ridiculous. Some items have multiple uses too which is a tad different from most point and click adventure games of this type. I’m looking at you Artifex Mundi – why bin off my perfectly useful screwdriver after one use?!

Musically and graphically it’s not enjoyable and uninspiring. You don’t really notice it either because you are too busy reading and rereading all the narrative that comes with making your way around the game world.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 40 Achievements

The easy achievements are only easy if you use a guide, otherwise some of them are fucking stupid which I will go into later. In order to get them all quickly you will need to strategically save and reload. The game is frustrating in this regard too as you only get the one save file, so if you get half way and want to make a checkpoint but start from your earlier save, you can’t.

For the main story you will get 14 achievements. The other 26 are missable and some of them are missable because they cross over with other achievements. Several examples of these are the mobile phone achievements. You have to call R.L. Stine from the payphone and using your phone after finding his number. You also have to download a song on to your phone or use a cassette player to play it. There are also achievements related to not using your phone at all throughout the playthrough and another for completing the game with a dead phone battery – but if you do this, somehow your in-game mother can still call you during the end game sequence.

There are a few other notable ones from my playthrough but probably the two biggest ones are for getting all the items in your inventory – of which there are 118 of the buggers – and, associated to this, for getting five items from the laundry chute. This is just fucking stupid. To get an item from the laundry chute, you have to drop an item down there, go from the chute to the laundry room, check the basket for the item and if its not the one you want, go back and do it again. You don’t get the five items you need in a row so you have to keep repeating this inane process, complete with narrative interference, over and over again until you get lucky. Dumb as fuck.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Goosebumps: The Game wasn’t fun, it felt a bit of a slog and it’s a clunky game. It did offer some light nostalgia but not enough to stop me having a negative opinion of the experience. I’m often asked why I persevere with unenjoyable games. I’ve seen a lot of people play games for five minutes to an hour and then not play them again but I don’t think you can form a subjective opinion over something in such a short time period. For me, a lot of gaming is trying new things and you have to see them through in order to learn if you enjoy them.

Hue

Hue is another randomly selected backlog game that I must have added to my game collection during a sale of some kind using my wish list. My lasting impression is that it was a really good game that offered a lot of enjoyment over the short play time.

Hue follows the story of... Hue. He is a boy that appears to go looking for his mother or something and gains the ability to use colours to make stuff disappear and reappear. I will confess to not paying much attention to the story and while I think it is a good game, fuck me some of the dialogue is horrendously pretentious. I’m not sure if it’s one of those moralistic pieces about the fabric of society or one of those pieces that is designed to make us question our existence but when a mother writes the line, ‘perhaps everyone in this world only sees shades of grey’ they certainly aren’t trying to be to the point. There are more pretentious lines than this one but I would have to go through all of the game on play back to find them.

The game wins all its points for the solvable and not ridiculous puzzles that, upon completion, offer a sense of reward to the gamer. As you go through various areas of the game you gain more colours. You can switch the background colours in order to make objects that are blocking your path disappear. As you get more colours, the puzzles become more complex. I managed to get right to the end before having to look at a guide and that was only for one of the puzzles. For other gamers, this may indicate that the puzzles are easy but for me, they were the right level of challenging.

Musically and graphically is does what it has to do for a puzzle game. Not irritate and be clear and easy to see what’s going on. It ticks both these boxes too so it’s just the story that can do one. It adds nothing to the game.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 13 Achievements

It’s a really straightforward list where 10 of the 13 achievements can be gained by getting to the end. That only leaves another three.

There is another for watching the credits which role automatically when you get to the end and another for making 5,000 objects disappear via colour changes. I got this one so early on that you will most likely get this through normal game play anyway.

The last one and the one that is the most frustrating is for finding all of the secret beakers that are hidden in the various areas you visit. Each area has a counter which shows how many beakers you need to find and you can revisit any area at any point. The biggest pain about getting these though is that you can’t do in one run through as you need to advance through the game to get certain colours and then backtrack. It’s annoying because you have to go through the same puzzle rooms again to get to where the beaker is located. It’s the only frustrating thing about the achievement list.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Hue is a solid puzzle game that offers a few solid hours of enjoyment. It took me less than 5 hours to complete and it retails at £11.99 when full price so I would recommend getting in a sale.

Lost Grimoires 2: The Shard of Mystery

I think I mentioned at the end of my last Artifex Mundi review that they had released another two games right when I thought I was done. Lost Grimoires 2 is the first one we have gotten around to playing. And we smashed it in one evening.

Lost Grimoires 2: The Shards of Mystery follows the story of… someone as they go on a mission to save the kingdom of somewhere from an evil person trapped in a mirror. Minor spoilers – this one doesn’t do the Artifex Mundi story trick here where you get to the end of the game only for the person you thought was evil to suddenly be revealed as not evil. This bitch in the mirror is evil throughout the entire thing.

You start by helping your nephew who becomes king at a young age and then when he goes a wondering one night you run into his bit of stuff who just happens to be the daughter of the evil bitch. The evil bitch is trying to escape the mirror and it’s up to you to a solve a load of puzzles save the kingdom and do away with evil bitch once and for all. It’s a pretty mystical and farfetched storyline and if I’m honest, I didn’t pay that much attention to it while it was happening.

The gameplay is standard faire by now. Solve puzzles, complete hidden picture scenes, etc. There were some slightly different hidden picture scenes where you have to find the items based on the pictures but it’s stuff being recycled from the previous games. The puzzles were good and still offer that rewarding feeling you get when you complete without a guide so it’s an all good more of the same.

I complained quite heavily about the music and ridiculous non-puzzle bits in the first Lost Grimoires and they have significantly cut down on these here which is good. The music wasn’t really noticeable at any point either and that’s only a good thing but that may have been down to the shortness of the game.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 13 Achievements

It’s a short achievement list with only the single playthrough required to get all the achievements as there is no additional game to play here. All of the achievements bar two are missable. Playing the game through on expert will get you the two unmissable achievements for completing the game.

The remaining 11 are what you would expect from an Artifex Mundi game with the exception of finding hidden roses throughout the scenes. There are 31 roses to find, one in each scene you encounter and they are all fairly easy to spot. Of these 11, there are three achievements connected to the roses.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Lost Grimoires 2 is one of the quicker and easier Artifex Mundi games to complete. The storyline is just there as background for the puzzles which are the main selling point of the series. All in all, it’s a solid game with an easy achievement list.