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Immortal Lovers
Text Review
Two things seem to be popular these days: sexy vampires and hidden object games. Sexy vampires I can understand, well the vampire part, they are dark and mysterious and offer a cautionary tale about curing the cautionary condition. Hidden object games not so much. Either way Immortal Lovers takes the popular character type and popular genre and mashes them together in an attempt to create a peanut butter in my chocolate/chocolate in my peanut butter combination. But does it work?
The premise is simple: teenage Valerie doesn’t want to go on vacation with her family, she would much rather stay at home with her friends, but she has to go anyway. Little does she know that her run-of-the-mill family vacation will turn into an adventure as a walk in the woods leads her to be rescued by the mysterious Vincent.
At its core Immortal Lovers is a hidden object game. You spend the majority of the gameplay scouring screens for items hidden in the background. Sometimes you are looking for specific objects from a list and other times you are looking for a number of objects of a given type. It’s not an un-enjoyable way to while away some time, but it can get frustrating when you are looking for one of the last objects and just can’t seem to find it. Luckily, for such situations, the game has a built in hint system: a rose acquired on the first screen sits in the lower right hand corner and scatters petals around a hidden object when clicked. After getting such a hint, you will have to wait a while for the rose to recharge.
In addition to searching for hidden objects, the game also takes a page out of Highlights for Children and asks players to identify the difference between two scenes. The initial spot the differences task is fairly simple, but soon these sections turn difficult when you are asked to tell the difference between two scenes that are mirrored from each other (meaning the image on the right is flipped). It’s almost unfair to ask the human brain to find the differences in a situation like this and, unfortunately, the hints system that works so well in other areas seems to fall short here. Some of the differences are so small that the broad circles of petals don’t provide much help, while at other times the rose merely drops a couple of petals or even none at all leaving you little recourse, but to click at random until the hint is available again.
Between searching for objects, the game lets you move between screens in an adventure game style, making it seem more interconnected and less like a random collection of rooms. Also breaking up the object hunting are different puzzle mini-games that include sliding block puzzles and jigsaw-like puzzles. If you manage to get stuck in any of these mini-games, you can simply click a button to skip the sequence. This is a welcome addition since some of the sliding block puzzles can be time consuming.
But what about the vampire angle? Truth be told, the gameplay has little to do with vampires. Most of the vampirism is handled in short cut scenes that usually happen at the beginning and ending of each of the three chapters. These cut scenes are somewhat disjointed, as if they were poorly translated, and often play out slowly.
So how does Immortal Lovers fair in making two popular things play well together? Not so well. From a gameplay standpoint, Immortal Lovers is an okay hidden object game, but it’s short and doesn’t really bring anything new to the table. As an entire game experience, it’s not very good at all; the story isn’t very compelling and seems as if it was tacked on at the end of development. Combine this with the short length and Immortal Lovers seems more like an attempt to cash in on the Twilight craze than a proper game.
- Brian Easton
Developer: Daedalic Entertainment
Publisher: Prime Games (via Legacy Games)
Platform(s): PC
The premise is simple: teenage Valerie doesn’t want to go on vacation with her family, she would much rather stay at home with her friends, but she has to go anyway. Little does she know that her run-of-the-mill family vacation will turn into an adventure as a walk in the woods leads her to be rescued by the mysterious Vincent.
At its core Immortal Lovers is a hidden object game. You spend the majority of the gameplay scouring screens for items hidden in the background. Sometimes you are looking for specific objects from a list and other times you are looking for a number of objects of a given type. It’s not an un-enjoyable way to while away some time, but it can get frustrating when you are looking for one of the last objects and just can’t seem to find it. Luckily, for such situations, the game has a built in hint system: a rose acquired on the first screen sits in the lower right hand corner and scatters petals around a hidden object when clicked. After getting such a hint, you will have to wait a while for the rose to recharge.
In addition to searching for hidden objects, the game also takes a page out of Highlights for Children and asks players to identify the difference between two scenes. The initial spot the differences task is fairly simple, but soon these sections turn difficult when you are asked to tell the difference between two scenes that are mirrored from each other (meaning the image on the right is flipped). It’s almost unfair to ask the human brain to find the differences in a situation like this and, unfortunately, the hints system that works so well in other areas seems to fall short here. Some of the differences are so small that the broad circles of petals don’t provide much help, while at other times the rose merely drops a couple of petals or even none at all leaving you little recourse, but to click at random until the hint is available again.
Between searching for objects, the game lets you move between screens in an adventure game style, making it seem more interconnected and less like a random collection of rooms. Also breaking up the object hunting are different puzzle mini-games that include sliding block puzzles and jigsaw-like puzzles. If you manage to get stuck in any of these mini-games, you can simply click a button to skip the sequence. This is a welcome addition since some of the sliding block puzzles can be time consuming.
But what about the vampire angle? Truth be told, the gameplay has little to do with vampires. Most of the vampirism is handled in short cut scenes that usually happen at the beginning and ending of each of the three chapters. These cut scenes are somewhat disjointed, as if they were poorly translated, and often play out slowly.
So how does Immortal Lovers fair in making two popular things play well together? Not so well. From a gameplay standpoint, Immortal Lovers is an okay hidden object game, but it’s short and doesn’t really bring anything new to the table. As an entire game experience, it’s not very good at all; the story isn’t very compelling and seems as if it was tacked on at the end of development. Combine this with the short length and Immortal Lovers seems more like an attempt to cash in on the Twilight craze than a proper game.
- Brian Easton
Developer: Daedalic Entertainment
Publisher: Prime Games (via Legacy Games)
Platform(s): PC
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