for ipod download The Secret Order 8: Return to the Buried Kingdom

You’ll have three items that could feasibly cut a thread, for example, and then it presents you with a thread. The Secret Order: Return to the Buried Kingdom has a habit of giving you two or three items that are effectively the same thing. More so than in other hidden object games, there are weird, avoidable quirks. Then it’s onto the adventuring, the point-and-click sections of the game. It’s a matter of preference, really: if you like your puzzles breezy, with great interactions but ultimately no real challenge (and a constant avalanche of achievements), then this has your back if you like your puzzles fiendish, requiring a sheet of graph paper to work out, then you’ll probably resent the game. There’s nothing here that’ll get you bringing a notepad out, or hovering a thumb over the ‘skip puzzle’ button on the interface. If anything, they are easier than other hidden object games, almost to the point of being benign. The narrative falls off the bone like slow-cooked meat (although, now I think of it, there IS a skeleton-harp chimera that’s pretty cool). Artifex Mundi and developers Sunward Games have nailed this kind of thing before, but here it feels sloppy. A millisecond-long cutscene pops in and you’re whisked to a location without any sense of how you got there. Twice I was ambushed in the game, but there was no real sense of who did it, why, or how they got to me.

There are two main characters, one of whom disappears inexplicably for the whole game, while the other does a character u-turn that doesn’t make any sense, because, again, it’s all a bit hasty and not fully explained. Secret Order throws the necromancer at you as a big-bad without any real sense of what he wants, what his character is about, and what kind of threat he offers. My issue is with how rushed it all feels.

The world is a relatively generic fae/fantasy hybrid, with about three different art styles, but that never really bothers me either.

In broad strokes it’s great: a world that’s gone to pot after its ‘Mother Dragon’ kicks the bucket is fine, and tacking on a necromancer who wants to fill the vacuum… well, that’s fine too. The story in Secret Order: Return to the Buried Kingdom is… a clumsy fumble.

For ipod download The Secret Order 8: Return to the Buried Kingdom