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| | Publisher: NevoSoft  Genre: Puzzle & Trivia | | | Min OS X: 10.4 |
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Laura Jones & the Gates of Good and Evil
April 8, 2009 | David Allen | |
In the same way the name "Laura Jones" combines (sort of) the first and last names of two of the world's most well-known fictional archeological adventurers, Laura Jones and the Gates of Good and Evil attempts to bring new life to the hidden-object genre by adding logic puzzles, twitch-reflex games, word unscrambling and more gaming twists.Tome Raider The storyline, such as it is, involves following the clues left by your missing professor to you, his capable graduate assistant, in order to find several missing artifacts that when collected will unlock the mystical Gates of Good and Evil. Doing so will offer the opener unlimited power over the fate of all mankind. In addition to dealing with the usual cast of sinister conspirators and ancient pagan idols, this quest involves such tasks as rummaging under a jock student's bed, making coffee for a grumpy college janitor, replanting a torn-up garden, feeding hedgehogs by shooting arrows at a fruit tree, and playing a facsimile of "Jeopardy" with a pre-teen girl.Rather than get into an exegesis of the flimsy story-line, I'll plunge right into decoding the gameplay. The core of this game, as you may have guessed, is finding a bunch of stuff on a crowded screen. This is certainly nothing we haven't all seen before, and if you have ever played one of these games before, you'll quickly get the hang of it. In fact, even if you haven't, you'll still find it very easy to grasp. The twist to this premise is that in many instances you must find them in a certain sequence, which will in turn cause elements on the screen to move or disappear, allowing you to uncover more hidden objects, and so on. For example, in one segment, you have to hunt around to find a combination to a safe, and then you open the safe, which tells you to find some more objects, and so on. So, in effect, the vertical X and the horizontal Y axes you're used to exploring is enhanced by the Z axis that goes "deeper" into the screen. I'm not saying it's 3-D, mind you, just that some depth is added to the usual hidden object setup.
However, having played a few of these games at this point I would have to say that even with the added logic elements, the hidden objects are just too easy to find. There's no timer to add any sense of urgency, and after a certain point in the game you will have accumulated so many "free hints" that it's probably impossible to NOT find everything. If you have some degree of patience, even the most difficult challenges in the game will inevitably be overcome. And, as you'll see if you read on, even the most challenging parts of the game just aren't very hard. In addition to the logic puzzles built into the core hidden-object screens, "The Gates" also brings some more games of this sort as well as some "physics puzzle"-type mini-games into the story. As you go through the game collecting artifacts, the "spirit guardians" of each artifact makes you undergo an "ordeal" to prove worthy of the artifact. Balancing differently-weighted jewels on elaborate scales, steering ships by turning wind generators the right way, and the aforementioned hedgehog-feeding activity all count as ordeals. After you've beaten the ordeals, you can return to them as mini-games listed on the main menu. I'm not sure why you would do so, seeing as the mini-games appear to be exactly the same as the ones you've solved already, so if you have a decent visual memory or you remembered to take some screenshots, there's no challenge at all.
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