Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Cassandra's Journey: The Legacy of Nostradamus

Cassandra's Journey: The Legacy of Nostradamus brought to you via JoyBits, is a mostly hidden-object game.

In addition to the levels, there are 3 "divination" games that are unlocked via progressing through the story. They are unlocked at levels 4, 13, and 20.

The story is that a woman comes to you, Cassandra, who has recently started her divination business. She wants to find her brother. You have inherited your grandmother Serena's sense of fortune-telling, but need additional help from Nostradamus' ring. You start to have a vision of him, which oddly starts out with him IMing you.

There are two gameplay options: timed or relaxed. Like most hidden object games, there are penalties for random clicking (30 seconds), and hints that can be collected throughout the levels. There are blue, red, and green gems, which are banked as points. You spend the points on one of 3 items to help locate: a wand that glows brightly when lit (2 points), a general area highlight (1 point), or an object locator (3 points). The points add up quickly so if you want to be a lazy player and not look hard, there are lots of opportunities to acquire and use the hints. However, you get a time bonus and bonus points for not using jewels and/or hints, so to maximize your score, you want to use as few as possible.

There are other puzzle types: click to place the tile; "fix" something in the hidden object screen (reassemble a pizza; a building roof), match 3 to get a key and jewels, a semi-crossword, etc.

What they did well: The intro music was nice. It does have multiple types of puzzles to solve. They use the gamut of hidden object lists: riddles, puzzle pieces, lists, outlines. For their find-a-difference puzzles, there were 3 pictures instead of two, which made it slightly more challenging. They also used crosswords and match-3.

What they could've done better: First, proof-read. The text has quite a few glaring spelling errors. Plus, the conversations made little sense and the characters were less than believable. I'd prefer you not give me characters and text to read unless it really means something. Level 11 was very annoying to me, because you really don't do anything. The circles around the find the difference scenes made it difficult to detect the last few differences because the circles were so large. The book to start each level has even and odd pages. The odd pages automatically updated the picture to the left, which you could click on to start. In order to access the even pages, you had to physically click on the page on the book, then the picture. I encountered a bug that made a ticking sound loop over and over. Closing and restarting the game fixed the problem, but it happened more than once. Each divination can only be accessed once a day. There were a few random, odd voice-overs. I was very disappointed in the "magic tricks" which were glorified logic puzzles, optical illusions, and puzzles that have been passed around in e-mails for a long time.

Overall, it was not a very solid game, but kids and fans of hidden object games who want to play all varieties might enjoy it.

Hints (spoilers):
On the first find a difference:
Crow, bunny, pizza, scarf, sandwich on table, chair placement, sunglasses on head, picture (red shirt), photographer's bag

Words in crossword:
page2: forune, that, grandmother, magic, guess
page 3: Ring, help, have, mission(6)
page 4: greatest, talisman, with, thing

Chapter 13 find-a-difference:
chair, chick, banana, gramophone, postman, leaf, basketball, cactus, crow tag, small picture on board
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Posted by CasualGameGirl at 10:15 PM

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