Enigmatis: The Ghosts of Maple Creek

Steam edition is buggy, read the discussions before buying. The magnifying glass meant to be used in order to zoom in on evidence in the tutorial may not work, requiring odd steps to bypass that check. Hidden Objects tend to only be clickable on certain edges, leading to a lot of frustration. After running into those issues in the first ten minutes and then hearing they only get worse as time goes on, I put this game down and played through the sequel. The sequel is well designed and has a better voice cast, so feel free to skip ahead as well.

Coming back to this game, I was able to finish it. The pipe puzzle is bugged due to the magnifying glass being stuck on, so I needed to hit the Skip button. This helped me continue the story, but it locked me out of the relevant achievement. I needed the Hints to help me find several hidden objects and some interactive spots on the world map. Again, an item I had clicked several times didn't register until I used the Hint function to confirm that it was the correct item. Much of the game was backtracking and hoping that the Hidden Object locations would randomly become interactive again.

Artifex Mundi has a collection of great games, this one has apparently just not aged well and is lacking in tech support. It is playable and the story is okay, but the encountered bugs seem to effectively lock out a full achievement run.

Really fun hidden object game, brings me back to my childhood, really easy to 100%

Really liked this game. HOG heavy in comparison to other games, so recommend if you enjoy that. The storyline is good too. The only downside is that there's no instant map travelling so the player needs to manually go back and forth each location (and there's a fair amount of that)

Sometimes I'm stuck on what to do as it's not leading enough or the HOG hints aren't helpful like Mars is not what you think.

i recommend this game, the HOG part is fun, the storyline flowed well!

great puzzle game with great story line

Intriguing story line, fun hidden pictures! Kept us wanting to go on to the next objective!

If you’re coming from the Grim Legends games, like I did, this game is going to make you very angry.

First and foremost, as a variety of people have mentioned in the comments, there are one or two game breaking bugs that stop you cold. There are no resolutions to these problems, other than to start over and hope that the second time through you manage to somehow avoid them. This happened to me. And of course, it took me at least 15 or 20 minutes to realize the game was broken – I kept looking around, assuming I had just missed something.

Second, the lack of a fast travel map makes this game so, so, so tedious at certain points. All of these games are going to have a degree of pixel hunting and wandering around – but when you also have to click and click and click to just get to the screen you want to investigate again, it’s going to grate on your patience. There are literally times when you need to go through 20 screens to get where you want to go, because unlike Grim Legends, screens are basically never closed off permanently. The game also teaches you that the hidden object puzzles are going to be reused – you just don’t know when. So you are required to go back. The game just wants to waste your time. The worst part of all of this is that there *is* a map – you just can’t fast travel with it.

Additionally, I find the hidden object puzzles in this game to be much more of a challenge. Not because of how clever all of the object placements are, but because I guess the resolution is lower, and all of the objects are just kinda muddy. It’s hard to tell what the heck you are even looking at sometimes. The most rage inducing one I can remember is looking for “paper”. In the scene, it appears there are four or five different things that are made of paper, but nope – none of those. It’s a small nondescript area that just looks like gray background between some items. Not a balled up sheet of white paper, not a stenno pad, yellow legal paper, or college ruled sheet. Nope – just muddy gray nothing.

Another thing that seemed much worse with this game were just the things you are required to make use of. Without spoiling it – you come across some boxes that say “Hmm, these seem pretty flimsy”. But you can’t just stomp on them, of course – nor can you use a saw you’ve found or bash them with a heavy thing your inventory. You need to transport some liquid at some point, but you can’t use the two containers you have in your inventory, nor can you use the container the liquid is already in, for reasons not explained. Somehow Grim Legends just didn’t feel this needlessly complicated – maybe cause of the magical nature of stuff? I mean, it was absurd, but not THIS absurd.

Finally, there were a couple of screens that had items right by the bottom edge of the screen, where the pointer becomes a “go back”. My god, I wasted so much time going back through old screens to find what I was missing. When I finally relented and looked at a guide, I got an eye injury because of excessive eye rolling.

In each of the Grim Legends games, I resorted to a guide once, if I remember correctly. Each time, I was like “Oh, yeah – I should have gotten that.”. I’m not even done with this first Enigmatis game, and my patience wore thin very early – I’ve probably looked at a guide 5 times already. 1 of those 5 times was “I should have gotten that.” The others were “This game is stupid”.

I bought the whole set of these games for only a few dollars. So it’s hard to say it’s not worth it. But you’ll just want to temper your expectations a bit...

I absolutely loved the set up of everything! While I did get this game drastically on sale, I would've bought it full price for how great it was. Big recommendation to any hidden object adventure lover out there!!

Enigmatis: The Ghosts of Maple Creek

Has a total of 6 trading cards.

Just a good, clean, high-quality point-and-click mystery adventure that knows exactly what it is, sticks to themes, and delivers on its promises. Gorgeous artwork, compelling story, well-cultivated vibes.

You can tell that a lot of passionate professional work went into making this game, very polished final product.

Would highly recommend if you are a fan of classic point-and-click, find-the-object adventure games.

The pickaxe did not work on the priest.

i lik to find things.i like to follow a map. i like to discover things.

mouse keeps freezing while i play.

TLDR: """Recommended""" Only if you are already a fan of point and click item hunting games - and are okay with a lot of backtracking and frustrating "order of events" moon logic

Pros:
- The environment art is very nice
- good music and spooky ambient noise
- a very silly horror mystery
- some of the voice acting is sooooooooooooooooo unintentionally funny (this might be a con to some)

Neutral:
- The item finding is pretty standard
- some of the art for items are so very clearly not part of the background or scaled very oddly, it can be funny so it gets a pass
- while the setting is vaguely American some British terms are used for items (like "plaster" instead of "bandage" and such)

Cons:
- some of the puzzles feel dumb because you need to do things like scrape moss off a rock - Detective just use your hands
- "I can't reach this item that visually looks very reachable"
- I need to break this glass, I will ignore all the rocks or other heavy objects around until I have a hyper specific item
- this is pretty common for the genera but I still roll my eyes sometimes
- the backtracking is pretty bad, especially given the silly way you get to one half of a city
- Sometimes you will not know what to do, and the thing you need to do is actually go back to an area you did an item finding section in, and you do another round of item finding in that spot to get something to progress
- also sometimes an item is called by a name that not even correct, or at least uncommonly used for it
- I used the puzzle skip very often, because when faced with a tile slide puzzle you must ask yourself "do I want to let any of the limited time in my life be used on a slide puzzle?" the answer will always be no

Just a "meh" rating on this one. Cheesy story with poor voiceovers and a myriad of "Where's Waldo" searches. This one bored me .

A good easy game

loved this game. the bonus chapter was meh, and it would be nice to be able to hop from one part of the map to another but overall this was a good HO game.

Fun hidden object game with enjoyable puzzles and an engaging mystery that unfolds along the way. I had fun hunting for the achievements too. Recommended!

good

Pretty good game.

i enjoy seek and find games just as much as everyone. this series and yes i have played all of them. i very much enjoyed playing the whole series. it kept me on my toes and the story behind it all was very shocking and thrilling.

Okay, so I did recently finish the Enigmatis trilogy in the last month and I do have some things to say in regards to when I played the game on my Steam Deck. So, in regards to the original, which this did show on my Steam Deck with a question mark icon as unknown, I can fill in a couple of details on this. I can confirm that the main part of the gameplay (hidden object and puzzles) did translate well into the Steam Deck, which is great. Almost kinda like playing it on the PC itself. The only criticism I have with how it can play on the Steam Deck is that you cannot change your name once you make a profile (I tried multiple times to no avail). You'll still need to play this on the PC itself if you want to change your name to anything outside of "Player" and just for that.
I do hope this review does help with figuring out the Steam Deck compatibility for this specific entry and for those curious enough to try the game out. Overall, aside from the name change issues with the Steam Deck version, I'd give this a 7.5/10. Great game, but it does show first game jank issues with the backtracking and lack of map to help with fast travel, which help a lot with games like these.

This game has an interesting story. It's honestly kind of scary when playing at night. The puzzles were challenging and fun. The only thing I was really missing is fast travel. It takes quite long to traverse the big map.

very good anyone got hidden ojects

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Khám Phá Bí Ẩn Nơi Có Rắt Nhiều Cây Phong Lá Đỏ

Enigmatis: The Ghosts of Maple Creek opens up for an enjoyable trilogy of games. This, being the first in the series, gives the story a strong start. Enjoy exploring the town of Maple Creek, recently devastated by a storm. This game was very enjoyable for me and I had a ton of playing it. I enjoyed the puzzles and the story was well constructed.
However, I must admit that there are quite a few bugs and incorrect names for some of the items. A good example of a huge bug is the magnifying glass. As a total newbie to the H.O.G (Hidden Object Games) world, I wanted to follow the tutorial so that I could learn how to play. Right at the beginning it shows you how to use the magnifying glass, but it doesn't work at all. Thus, you cannot progress past the tutorial. The only option was to delete my save and start over and not use the tutorial mode. I had a horrible first impression of the game because of that but still, as mentioned above, ended up loving this game.
If you can get past the bugs, some of the cheesy voice acting, and the incorrect names for some of the items, this game is very well worth the play-through!

fun, engaging story. backtracking is annoying, especially as you get more locations, but it wasn't that bad. lots of scenes and content, although the object names didn't make sense sometimes. overall, i think it's a good game for how old it is, solving the mystery's fun and the difficulty's alright.

I really enjoyed it. It’s fun, good amount of tension (not too scary, but has eerie vibes) and the graphics takes me back to my childhood games. Can’t wait to play other parts of the trilogy!