Merry Christmas, one and all. How better to celebrate the festive season than a story of vengeful ghosts, a haunted island, and some hidden object gaming. You can almost smell the Christmas cheer and mulled wine.
Hidden object enthusiasts will note something unusual straight off the bat. This is not a game from Artifex Mundi, a publishing house that has developed a seeming monopoly over the hidden-object subgenre. Instead, it’s from Joindots GMBH, a name we recognise from pretty much every duff karting game that we’ve played recently (Rubberduck Wave Racer, emoji Kart Racer and Renzo Racer).
We were both happy and skeptical. We were happy as it’s refreshing to find someone other than Artifex making these games, perhaps even injecting some new ideas into something that’s gone a little stale. We were skeptical, as we weren’t sure the developers of Rubberduck Wave Racer were the ones to achieve it.
Artifex Mundi would do well to hire the story writers of Ominous Tales – The Forsaken Isle, at the very least. This is a coherent story, well told. We found ourselves actually comprehending every aspect of the narrative from beginning to end. You’re shipwrecked on an island that’s infamous for its spectral wolves. Task one is to stay alive. Task two is to unravel the story of a beautiful woman who fell in love with the brother of a trading mogul, rather than the mogul himself. How was the poor lady to know that the trader had a side-gig as a warlock?
We soon realised that Ominous Tales – The Forsaken Isle wasn’t going to innovate on the formula that we knew. It’s the same mix of hidden object scenes, minigames and graphic adventure, with a familiar assortment of tools to get you on your way. A map, hint system and journal aid your adventure. It has clearly used the Artifex series as its inspiration.
As someone who has played every last Artifex hidden object adventure, there are some ‘familiar but different’ quirks to get out of the way. Accessing the inventory of items is a fumbly affair, as there’s no button press that will open the inventory and let you sort through it. Instead, you’re pulling the cursor down to the inventory, at which point it opens. There’s no hope in hell that this is an improvement: it frustrated us every time we did it.
It’s a very subjective issue, but button-mapping is different. Pressing RT causes the triggering of a hint, rather than opening the inventory, which is something we accidentally did on multiple occasions. The cursor moved at about half the speed that we were used to (with no option to change it), while the map neglects to mention which area of the game needs your attention. Very generally, we would say that Ominous Tales – The Forsaken Isle is about a decade behind the Artifex Mundi games in terms of usability, accessibility and just feeling smooth to play.
The art isn’t quite there, either. There’s a vaseline-like smudge across a lot of the graphics in Ominous Tales – The Forsaken Isle, which is most noticeable with the hidden object scenes. They’re not quite as crystal clear as we’re used to, and that led to the odd misclick. We’re used to clarity and painterly scenes, and this falls a little short.
The feeling that everything’s a little off, a tier below the quality we’re used to, was pervasive. Take the logic in the graphic adventure stuff. There are too many logical leaps that don’t make sense, even in hindsight. At one point, we encountered a locked window. We had a crowbar in our hands so felt confident about our next steps. ‘Use crowbar on window’. But nothing happened. It’s only when we used a hint that the solution revealed itself: we were meant to use some butter in our inventory on the window. It loosened the hinges and the window came off. Take that, crowbar.
It keeps happening. A small venus flytrap holds a skull icon in its mouth. We used a stick to prop the mouth open and steal the skull, but – alas – no. The stick was incorrect. What we should have used was a plank, roughly ten times bigger than the flytrap. These logical missteps happen so often that we kept tumbling to the floor in frustration.
Oh yes, the minigames. Ominous Tales – The Forsaken Isle has several of them, but they tend to fall into two categories. There are the minigames where you can tinker with something, but tinkering with it changes its neighbour too. Forming a pattern becomes problematic, as every lever you pull will fiddle with a second, unwanted lever. So, there’s that kind of puzzle. The second brand of puzzle is one where you need to shuffle pieces on a board. But there are limitations on how you can move the pieces. Perhaps there are only a few paths, or a limited number of places to park the pieces.
That we can categorise Ominous Tales – The Forsaken Isle’s puzzles into two pigeonholes is a problem. From a very subjective point of view, they’re not puzzles that we like all that much: if we don’t unlock the secret behind solving them, they can devolve to brute-forcing, as we try every permutation. But they are the only puzzles in Ominous Tales – The Forsaken Isle. So, we were stuck with them. And it left us feeling like there was a slight bankruptcy of imagination.
While we emerged from Ominous Tales – The Forsaken Isle feeling like it was a bargain-bin hidden object game, we still admired it for a few things. It knows not to stick around too long, for one. We’ve recently finished Yuletide Legends: Who Framed Santa Claus, and that game simply refused to end. This is two-thirds of the length of an Artifex game, and we preferred the brevity. It rattles past at speed, and that’s a virtue. There’s the succinct, coherent story too, which we don’t underestimate.
Ominous Tales – The Forsaken Isle made us appreciate the Artifex Mundi games all the more. We’d taken them for granted. Though they may not remix their own formula often, they’ve refined it, and it’s only when we bashed into the various problems of Ominous Tales – The Forsaken Isle like a pinball that we realised that we didn’t know what we’d got till it was gone.
There’s no doubting that Ominous Tales – The Forsaken Isle is an inferior example of the hidden object genre. Very little is up to par: the art, the puzzles and the logic are all a bit skew-whiff. We found the enthusiasm to finish it, but we were thinking longingly about the hidden object games of Artifex Mundi as we did it. Only for the most hardcore of hidden object fans.
