The level of details this game goes for in terms of art presentation is outstanding and way beyond what you’d expect of a “casual” game.

The steampunk setting is a setup we don’t see all that often in recent works (or at least not that I’ve noticed). So it doesn’t come as overplayed when games like Clockwork Man 2 – The Hidden World comes along.  I’ve never tried the prequel to this casual game, but it didn’t stop me from being able to enjoy this one.

So what exactly is this game? It’s a puzzle adventure game, not unlike the such as the Monkey Islands, with its own rules and features. It mixes the elements of the prior mentioned game, where you need to use and mix items to solve puzzles and another part where you’re looking for specific items in screens filled with beautifully-drawn objects.

So did I enjoy it enough to recommend this game to the casual gamers in you? Read on to find out!

Developer: GameHouse
Publisher: GameHouse
Date of Release: Premium Edition: July 21, 2010
Platforms: PC (with a Mac version coming in September)

Genre: Hidden Object, Puzzle Adventure (think Visual Novels)
Players: 1

Story

The story picks up two years after the events of the first game. Like I mentioned, you won’t need to play the first one to understand what’s going on, as The Hidden World provides enough background information to the characters and setting for you to understand what’s going on.

So you play as Miranda Calomy, daughter of parents that left her eight years ago as they went on a journey. After finding artifacts left by her parents, Miranda finds herself on the way to Ireland looking for the Hidden World, while also running away from people interested in the secrets of those artifacts and mostly how they are related to this hidden world.

The story takes a few interesting twists that keeps it interesting enough to make you keep caring about the story. It’s nothing surprising and overly unexpected, but I don’t think that was the intent either. The story is just there enough for you to care about, without being intrusive too much into the gameplay, which is what really matters.

Presentation

The Premium Edition comes with a bunch of neat stuff. Most importantly, the chapter 3 is only available in this edition. There’s 6 chapters (plus a prologue), so I wonder why and how they went and removed the third one out of the standard edition, especially since it explains how you get to the entrance The Hidden World.

Also with the PE, you get what GameHouse calls an “Interactive Bonus Feature” set, which is a separate exe program that includes music from the game you can use to listen to or as a ringtone, in mp3 format, a bunch of wallpapers and concept arts and an interactive walkthrough that proved really helpful for the less obvious puzzles when I was stuck.

The game itself has a pretty handy interface, with items on top of the screen, abilities to help you find objects and solve puzzles on the lower left and your notebook and objectives on the lower right. It works well, and the only gripes I have with the presentation are minor.

First and foremost, even though I have a pretty good PC, it seems like the game runs on a software mouse or something, as it doesn’t move as smoothly as I wished at times. I have a really good video card, so I assume the game runs mostly off the CPU and probably doesn’t use more than one core, explaining why I would have problems?

Other than that, sometimes the game won’t close unless I end the process in the task manager. This is a really weird bug that might confuse people that wouldn’t know how to close a game this way.

One last bug I encountered was early on in the game, I need to scroll on a screen to the left, but the game wouldn’t let me. This was fixed by exiting the area, going elsewhere then going back.

Graphics

On the graphics side, everything is in 2D, but most of it is drawn at a pretty high resolution and everything is in layers, which adds a really neat and pretty sense of depth, especially when you use one of the game’s key features, the scrolling.

When you scroll horizontally through the scenery, objects closer to you move at a pace differently than those further from you, and this is always somewhat fun to look at and it also adds depth to the gameplay itself, as you might miss hidden spots where that last item you’re looking for is hidden.

I was also really impressed by the attention to details in both the drawings themselves and all the little touches in the scenery. For example, at one point in chapter 3, you’re in a submarine looking and looking through the glass you can see some kind of big fish monster’s shadow swimming through. Overall this game is really pretty to look at as long as you’re not of the mind that what makes a game pretty is its number of polygons… Joking aside, I’m not kidding when I was awed at some of the drawings.

Sound

The ambient music in the game fits right in, and while it’s nothing stellar, it’s good enough to feel the atmosphere of the game and doesn’t intrude on the experience.

The voice acting goes from great, Miranda and Sprocket (the robot that does noises to speak) are examples of voice acting done well for this kind of game, while others just feel like they’re talking to a tin can and not to another person.

Gameplay

The gameplay here is split mostly between finding hidden objects and puzzles. So I’ll separate this section between both.

Hidden Objects

About 70% of the game is spent going through one area to another and sometimes coming back to find hidden objects on the screen.  It’s a pretty simple concept; you click on the screen on objects that matches the list given to you to find what you need. The objects written in white on the list are fillers while the yellow ones will be useful to you for the puzzle parts.

Now you can click most of the time all over the place to try and get everything. That’s how I started most areas, as I was very likely to find what a good chunk of my list like that. But eventually, you’ll need to scrutinize and pay more attention to details, as a lot of the objects are camouflaged in the environment.

Adding to the challenge is the fact that some areas will have a second sub-areas you can zoom to, while others will let you scroll horizontally (and on rare occasions vertically).  The trickiest one though (and the most frequent ones) have you scroll through the area horizontally, letting you see at the same time from different angles behind objects that are in the foreground.

Still, there’s always the tougher one to find. Like I mentioned, some items tends to camouflage themselves in the scenery. For that, you have a few tools to really turns the odds for you. Sprocket, your steam-robot has abilities (that runs on cooldowns) for you to use. One is a sonar that will highlight the items for a brief moment. One will directly spot you where to find one of the items (randomly). One other will show you what the item you’re looking for looks like (you select from your list) and finally there’s the hints button, but that’s mostly for the puzzles.

It’s obviously the most casual part of the game and is more a relaxing distraction and a mean if you will to move further through the story than a fun and exciting or mind-bending challenge.  But that’s alright, we all have times where that’s what we feel like doing.  It’s not any different than playing Where’s Waldo really.

Puzzles

The rest of the game is spent solving different type of puzzles, going from making items by mixing stuff together in the right order to logic, observation and deduction based puzzles.

These are obviously the more fun part and some of them will keep you stuck if you don’t take your time to think about it. Others require popular classic culture knowledge to solve. And some are just plain brutal, chapter 3 hosting the worst of them in terms of difficulty as you’re trying to play with water pressure between three tubes and the solution requires over a dozen manipulations from neutral settings to get right. I think I would have given up if it wouldn’t have been for the walkthrough included with the Premium Edition.

But anyway, the puzzles were quite original and interesting, simply because the variation was very diverse and almost every single ones required a different perspective on things.

Overall

It should take you between around 4 hours to get through the game. Give or take one or so, depending on how much you rely on the walkthrough or how clever you are at solving some of the puzzles.

It’s a fun game with an intriguing story and it’s still a casual game, though some parts felt as deep or even deeper than some other games we consider non-casual. So take it as you may, I’ve enjoyed the hours I’ve spent through the game and I really wanted to get through the story as I played to find out what was going to happen next.

It might also be worth mentioning that you won’t be making dialogue choices in this game and that everything follows the script to the letter. I wouldn’t count this as a negative point, as I see it more as a choice of direction against another.

Pros and Cons

Pros
- Really beautiful art.
- The “horizontal scrolling” affecting the layers at different speeds is worth being seen.
-  Fun Challenging puzzles.
-  Story, characters and setting are quite charming.
- Actually quite long for a casual game.

Cons
- The few bugs
- Once you’ve beaten the game, there’s zero replay-value.
- Some of the voice acting is cringe-worthy.
- Standard Edition is missing a chapter in the middle of the story

The Save Factor

The standard edition goes for $6,99 and the Premium Edition goes for $19,99. But I think that $4 would be a good price for the standard edition and $8 for the Premium Edition considering the extra chapter that actually completes the story and the bonus features makes it worth at least twice as much as the Standard Edition.  But this also takes into account that you can get a game like Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge for $10 and that will keep you busy for a lot longer.

You can find the game here:  The Clockwork Man 2 – The Hidden World

A review copy was given to us for reviewing purposes.

David A. Games