26.1 hours played
Written 13 days ago
Pretty solid pack of games! Two really good ones, one okay one, and one overrated one imo.
There are two story styles to the games here, the two on the top (House Of 1000 Doors and Eternal Journey) have voice acting and longer cutscenes, and the two on the bottom (Dark Strokes and Stray Souls) are more text based and keep the cutscenes a little more simple. Both of these two groups have one really good game, and one game that's not on the same level.
Let's start with the group on the top first. House Of 1000 Doors and Eternal Journey.
"House Of 1000 Doors" is the overrated game in this pack, most reviews say it's the best one but I thought it was the worst. I found the cutscenes (outside of the one where we crash our car) to be boring and uninteresting, and the game's gimmick of having four separate worlds to visit felt less like a fun idea and more like they had 4 unrelated Hidden Object games lying around and threw them together to me. Each world tells a very similar story and by the time you've visited the first world, you already know what you're going to need to do at the end of the game. The gameplay was fine but all the swapping between worlds left me confused many times at what I needed to do, and the game's final cutscene felt rushed and unsatisfying. Don't understand the love for this one
However, everything "House Of 1000 Doors" gets wrong, "Eternal Journey" gets right imo. Engaging story (I was not expecting the twist near the end at all!), a better map that even tells you if you missed a secret item in a location, more interesting environments, and more fun everywhere! My one gripe with the game is that taking the train back and forth is tedious and slows down the pace quite a bit sometimes, but if that wasn't there I don't believe I'd have any outstanding issues with the game. Very good one, certainly recommend it.
Now lets go to the bottom group, Dark Strokes and Stray Souls.
"Dark Strokes" had to potential to be really good, but falters at too many points to be anything more than "okay" imo. This game has many technical issues that are annoying to work around: while playing in fullscreen (the best way to play these games imo, as it gives you the most room to see objects) one of the game's first puzzles will not work and multiple areas that I found myself passing through often would freeze the game every time and force me to use my windows button to escape fullscreen and get back into the game. That is easily the biggest problem with any of these games and it's made worse by the fact that the game could be very confusing at times for me which led to a ton of backtracking and frustration. Outside of technical issues and the amount of confusion I found while playing it, the game was alright. I like it more than "House Of 1000 Doors" because I found the story to be more engaging, and I liked the setting a lot more than visiting the random worlds of "House Of 1000 Doors", but the game could've been a lot better.
"Stray Souls" is exactly what "Dark Strokes" should've been. No technical issues, easy to figure out what you need to do next, the story's better, the visuals are very interesting and fun look at (the cutscenes change styles and it's a great touch imo), and it really feels like there was a lot of heart put into the game! I played this one as a kid and re-remembering what I needed to do (to get to the ending I still remembered over a decade later) made for a fun time that even my friends enjoyed. Along with "Eternal Journey", "Stray Souls" is a highlight of the pack and certainly one to remember.
As a whole I certainly recommend this pack to people who want some quality Hidden Object adventures! I do so on the back of how good "Stray Souls" and "Eternal Journey" are, but if you end up loving the other games included as well you'll absolutely get your money's worth.