Time Mysteries 2: The Ancient Spectres 12+

Game was really fun. Even the Object finds were done in the period. Beautiful artwork. Although there were a tone of Object Find scenes, the puzzles took a bit of throught to work through them; to figure out what to do. Through trial and error, was able to work through all of them except the last two - the Brass Leaves puzzle and the Glass pipes. Neither should have been difficult, but both didn’t allow me to reset the errors. With the brass leaves puzzles, in trial and error - I switched the green rings to the green symbols and brown to brown. That effectively stopped progression and I couldn’t reset it to begin again. The pipe puzzle had 5 broken pieces to stop your progress. When I checked out the “walkthroughs” and hints, all of those only had 4 broken areas to stop progress. So, don’t know what the problem was. I skipped those two. Other than that, I enjoyed it and the story. The time piece was a clever way to jump various scenes.

I’ve played most of Artifex Mundi’s games available on the iTunes store now and most of them are fantastic; beautiful animation, engaging storylines, and puzzles that are challanging but not rocket science. This one just flat out didn’t make any sense. Usually you can figure out where you need to go because the plot will help you along with what you need to accomplish and you can really immerse yourself in the world of the game. This one just had a really bland, nonsensical plot line that made it difficult to navigate. I used the hint button in this one more than any other hidden objects game. The ending leaves you at a weird cliffhanger that doesn’t really make any sense. We even tried playing Time Mysteries 3 and the ending still isn’t really resolved. They had a great idea with the time traveling thing, but they didn’t realy utilize it very much. It would’ve been cooler if they focused a little less on the mansion and the one random house in Venice and instead tried some different time periods to explore. The animation is pretty, I guess, but that’s about all I can say for this one.

This game was so beautiful and interesting and the story line was fun. I LOVED, LOVED, LOVED the time machine. The hidden object screens were very well done and sometimes rather tricky (in a good way). However, here comes the "buts." There wasn't instructions for the mini-games. There were a couple of them that I had to find walk-through online to know what to do. The hint button was worthless in many cases. As well done as I thought the hidden object screens were, there were way too many of them. Thank goodness for the toggle game that could be played instead of the HOS's. Although I had some issues with this game, I really did enjoy it. It truly is one of my favorite games that I have ever played… and I have played a lot of them. The beauty and imagination that went into the production of this game made it well worth the money.