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Smacka Shock
The story behind the game unfolds through captioned story boards that precede each chapter. It seems Captain Flint has found a gate to hell and using its power has cursed a treasure item belonging to each of the pirates with the black spot trapping their owners on the island to be his slaves forever. Now that Crusoe is on the island he too is cursed. Both his dog and Friday have disappeared so he alone must break the curse which he does by visiting each pirate plus a couple of other locations to retrieve the cursed items.
Retrieving some items is as simple as solving a puzzle to unlock a treasure chest. Most though follow the format of visiting a pirate, helping them in some way for example helping the musician pirate by finding all the bats in the picture, then finding all the items on a list that's presented. Some items on the list are written in blue, that means that a puzzle or challenge of some sort must be completed in order to find the item. Optionally the player may have to solve a puzzle to enter the pirate's location before the above tasks can begin.
Once all the items have been retrieved they are tested on Captain Flint's parrot which somehow got turned into a monkey. The result of all this testing is a poison which will undo the curse however before it can be delivered Crusoe needs a map through the labyrinth of caves to the gates of hell which means another round of challenges to retrieve parts of the map from various pirates.
There is no spoken dialogue in the game, when characters speak the text appears on screen. There's also very little animation so, for example, in a scene where the player is looking for objects the pirate may blink, a spider may climb the wall and an insect or rat may scurry across the floor occasionally. There are two modes of play, Relaxed and Survivor, the latter is a timed game and has fewer hints. There's a help function to help players who can't find that last item on screen and after multiple attempts at a puzzle the player is offered the chance to skip it.
The Good
I don't play hidden object games very often but having played this one last week and then another awful one this week it seemed important to make positive comments where they are due.
I played this game all the way through. In all it took between five and six hours to complete on the hard setting. Apart from a few puzzles it wasn't that taxing but it was interesting. There is a decent selection of puzzles to be had here, some I have not come across before.
The game had a standard format to each location which was solve a puzzle to unlock the door, find all instances of a specific item before the character will help, then find a list of specific items. However this wasn't adhered to so much that the game became repetitive. Sometimes the initial lock solving puzzle was omitted or in other cases the location was a treasure chest and that was the only puzzle there was. In one instance before the player could enter the 'find the object' phase they had to assemble the pirate from his bones and re-animate him first.Plenty of variety so the game was not boring.
The music wasn't bad, it consisted of a decent orchestral piece that would have been at home in a 50's pirate movie, and although that was the only 'big' piece it wasn't repeated to the point where I turned the sound off.
The drawing was first rate. The pictures were crisp, sharp, stuffed with items and were a pleasure to look at. I did get stuck a couple of times, once I could not find a cat because all that could be seen was a piece of it's tail poking out from behind the scenery, but that's about par for the course and certainly not something I'd hold against the game
The Bad
Not much wrong with this game really, for me they ticked all the right boxes and produced a game that I enjoyed playing. My only gripe is that it was a little bit too easy and a bit too short.
The Bottom Line
This is fun and it's well made. It's short but it will fill a dark night or a wet afternoon quite nicely