I don't have any innate bias against HdO, and I really like the "comic book" format - in fact I wish the game had been entirely comic-book-panel style. It was like playing an interactive Tintin comic. However:

- This is possibly the slowest-loading game I've ever played from Big Fish. Press the Play icon at the end of each scene and prepare for a long wait.

- The puzzles are extremely easy. Even some "for kids" games on this site are more challenging.

- The translation is not very good. I don't know what language HdO works in natively but it isn't English. I normally don't complain about that, but in this case I encountered at least two translation issues that made a hidden object harder to find - "blades" for "tears" and "bar" for a ship's steering wheel.

Frankly, the only reason I played as much of the demo as I did is that the story was compelling (about Judas and the thirty pieces of silver) and I liked the Tintin-style art. But I gather the game is short and I'm so impatient with its poky loading that I won't be paying for it.

I'm enjoying it a great deal so far. It might be less enjoyable if they hadn't put the kinda-brilliant "Rush" option in combat.

I agree that it's hard to remember what the various items do, here's a little help (I hope I get this right as I don't have the game open right this minute!):

Apples - heal a lot, rez dead party member
Meat - heal a lot, rez dead party member
Fish - heal a lot, rez dead party member
Cherries - remove poison
Bread - heal a little
Mushroom - recover spell points a little
Grapes - recover spell points a lot
Pumpkin - recover spell points a lot
Cheese - permanently gives the mouse one additional hit point (the game does not tell you what these do at ALL)

and:

Shamrock - ??? (luck perhaps?)
Coins and Gold Dust - money, natch
Stat boosts say what they do
Skulls - don't touch (sometimes you can't avoid it)

Don't forget to use the mouse's carrot transformation spell as much as possible. Not only does it prevent enemies from attacking you if they're carrotized, but at the end of the battle, you get a carrot for each successful transform - a health item you can actually carry with you.

I get an access violation and abrupt exit pretty much every time I complete a level. I'm not tremendously concerned, since I only play one level at a time anyway, and it never seems to prevent the game from saving my place, but it's annoying.

RosePortalGames wrote:May I ask what error you receive? No one else has been receiving that error, so I'm quite surprised.

I've sent you a private message here with the details. There is no error message. The game reliably hangs at the same place every time.

Hangs at the end of the initial training fight with the pirates. Every time. Win XP. Don't be telling me it's a graphics card. There hasn't been a graphics card incompatible with RPG Maker's 8-bit graphics since 1989.

Looks like it might be a more interesting plot than is typical for one of those RPG Maker games. Shame how it crashes at the end of the training fight against the pirates, every single time.

Very nice game. Nice to see something on BFG that isn't yet another hidden-object or match-three in disguise.

I gather the controls confuse some people. I'm sorry to hear it. The idea is that there are some things only the robot can do and some things only the girl can do. Once you master that you will usually need to control only one or other of them at one time, and switch back and forth between them a lot, the controls make far more sense.

Also, as long as I seem to be going against the general flow of opinion I'm pleased to see a game which can be played entirely with the keyboard if you so choose. I play these games on a laptop and I get really tired of all-mouse games; laptop pointing devices kill my fingers after a while. I'd like to see more games that don't forget to offer a keyboard option.

I didn't realize today until I tried to buy the game with a game club credit that CEs didn't work that way. This doesn't bother me - I simply won't pay for it - nor does waiting three weeks bother me, but I do resent the fact that if I do get the non-CE version of the game I will need to replay the first hour. I wish they would make clearer on the game page that CEs cannot be bought with game club credits.

Very few of these games, however excellent, are worth more than seven bucks, especially since there's so little that's actually new and interesting in them. I play them, as a pastime, and I don't mind paying seven bucks a pop if I like the trial, but I won't pay more than that for any game which is going to last 2-3 hours tops and then have zero replayability.

Ironically if they'd offer more pure-puzzle games like World Mosaics (match three games are not puzzles!), I'd pay $15-20 for those, because those can last me for months! But a two-hour game had better not cost more than a movie ticket, because that's about the same amount of entertainment I'm buying.

So, I see that even though I have an hour trial, the trial is actually over when you're about to enter the witch doctor painting. I hope this is not a sign that I'm being asked to pay for a game which is actually only about an hour long, like Dream Chronicles was ....