G5 Games

If you have a smart phone or an iDevice, you probably know that's it's pretty fun to just be able to pull it out and load up a short game you can play on a lunch break, on a car trip, or even while sitting in bed waiting to fall asleep.  There are lots of little companies that all try to carve out their own little niche in the marketplace, but from my exposure so far, none seem to be able to spam out games as quickly as G5 does.

Having played through some of their games now, I've come to come conclusions that I will share below.



I enjoy hidden object games.  I like searching around a picture trying to find a pipe, a rabbit, or a fire poker hidden somewhere in the details of a much larger image.   In that aspect, Lost Souls: Enchanted Painting does just fine.  There's a strange story layered over it, though, involving a magic painting that steals your (the mother's) son and you having to explore the worlds inside several other paintings in order to find him.

It's a bit like Myst meets The Pagemaster.

First off, who walks around dressed like this?

This is apparently what she wears around the house, and while I have no problem with the dress, what's with the choker that apparently flows down to wrap around her arms?  Seems like a good way to choke yourself out.

Second, there are two things about this kind of adventure game that irk me.  The first is known as "programmer's logic."

See, something that this game and many like it force you to do is pick up items scattered across the screen, carry them around, and then figure out how to use them to solve puzzles.  Of course, some are pretty simple such as "here's a key, there's a lock."  Other times, they get more obtuse such as "insert pearl into sword hilt" or "give top hat to pelican."

(If anybody can casually remember what game the pelican with the top hat comes from, I'll send a special prize to the first person who puts it in the comments below.  No cheating with Google.)

What the games sometimes come down to is you carrying around a whole bunch of things and just clicking on each one and then clicking it on the puzzle to see which one you're supposed to use with it and thus figure out what logic the programmer used to figure out how the puzzle worked.

"You have a fire poker and want to use it on the crab sitting on top of the key?  Well, I suppose you could, but we were really hoping you'd explore the map some more and come up with the parts to build a fishing pole with a hook to catch the loop of the key."

The second problem is that in these games everybody who isn't you is completely worthless as a person.  Each of the worlds you visit has a cast of characters, some of whom are interesting, others of who are annoying enough to make me want to let the bad guys win, and what usually happens is they describe the problem they're having, say what it is they need to solve it, and then send you off to find the item which someone else in the same village has.

If these characters would just talk to each other for a couple of minutes, they'd realize they don't need me.  When someone needs a set of hands to fix an old clock, why do I need to be the one to run down several houses and pick up the set of hands a guy happened to have?  You need a new magical stone from a cave, but the entrance has caved in?  Well, it turns out the gardener had a small pile of explosives, so why did I have to do that?  Why didn't the ruler send someone out to ask "hey, does anybody have something we can make a bomb out of?  We need to blow up some rocks so we can get a crystal so we don't all die."

I got the same feeling when I played another game, Spirit Walkers: Curse of the Cypress Witch, but to be fair, I don't think I'm the target audience.  You play as a young woman (playing as women becomes a recurring theme in these games, I've noticed) who is part of a group of other women that investigate ghosts.  You get caught up involved in a legend of a ghost that haunts woods, time travel, and a spirit dimension, and it all becomes ridiculously complex and leaves huge plot holes.

But again, everybody who isn't you is absolutely worthless.  To be fair, one of your group is attacked and is pretty much comatose through most of the game, but the other two people contribute nothing to the success of the story.  There's a moment when I need to extract sap a cypress tree in order to work towards getting a potion made for my group to be sent back in time (it makes sense in the game- actually, no it doesn't), and someone who's standing on the large roots of the tree says "here, use my knife."

I have an idea, why don't you get the tree sap since you have the knife?  I'm busy rebuilding a gear system to open a small dam so water flows back to the tree, shift an entire tree in a swamp by myself so I can walk across it, and figure out how to use magic.

Later on you wind up having the husband-to-be of the not-dead-yet-but-future-ghost following you around as you use him to lift heavy objects and push things around, and I swear the guy hits on you every chance he gets.  It's pretty unnerving.

However, if the big plot twist in the game had been "you steal the fiance of the woman who would've been the ghost and then you become the ghost," that would've been pretty inventive.

There's also no hidden object puzzles in it, it's just "click on everything you can find and then try to use it on everything else."

The most recent one I played was Nightmares From The Deep: The Cursed Heart.  It brought back the hidden object puzzles, but it had something new that drove me a bit crazy.  You have to revisit locations often, and the same picture will be used for the hidden puzzles.  However, the second time you do it, the stuff you sought the first time is still gone, and you just have to gather up the rest of the items.  This is pretty clever, but it leads to two problems:

1)  Why couldn't I just do all of the searching at once since I know I'm just going to have to come back and look for something else later?  And don't say that "well, you don't know what that other object is yet" because half the time I have no idea what I'm looking for already and when I find it, I have no idea what to do with it.

Seriously, when the prize the game gives you for solving a puzzle is "you have a useful object: eye" then something needs explanation.

2) The game doesn't tell you when one of the puzzle area reactivates, so you have to wander around the map until the game helpfully points out "hey, look, you can click over here to do this puzzle again!"  Nothing tells you "head to the ship's kitchen to search for X" or "take the boat out to the lighthouse to find Y," so you can easily get frustrated wandering back and forth looking for what you're supposed to do next.

This was also one of those games that has one of my least favorite plot hooks in it: the remains of a supposedly immortal pirate are brought to the museum you own, along with his golden sword, his musket, and the strange glowing red jewel rumored to be what kept him alive.

You, in your infinite wisdom, decide to put all three items where they belong on the body.  Surprise, he immediately comes to life, kidnaps your daughter, and then has his ghost sailing ship crash through the wall of the museum and carry him off to "Skull Island."

...now, to be fair, when the ghost ship blew apart the wall and kicked up the floor as it slid across the ground, my expression was pretty much "oh heck yeah, that's awesome."

However, I'm pretty sure I could have also won the game by just not putting the stuff on him in the first place.  It's like Thermonuclear War: The only wining move is not to play.

Completely unrelated note, but it seemed weird to me that the game left the daughter's age really ambiguous, letting you think she's anywhere between seventeen and her early twenties, but they sure spent a lot of time making sure she had a pretty impressive figure.

The games are decent time wasters, but I think I prefer the ones that focus on searching for hidden objects to trying to tell a comprehensive story.  Considering their website states they crank out a new game every week (!), it's pretty clear they're going for quantity over quality.

But hey, if you have a half hour to kill, you could do worse.

Side note: there's one game that has swept through my family called The Secret Society that has a multitude of hidden object puzzles.  It even changes it up by only showing you the silhouette of what you're looking for, stating the name of what you're looking for with no picture, or turning off the lights and giving you a flashlight to find the objects with.

I like these ideas, because it means they're trying to shake up the standard game formula, but it would help if the game let you know what the objects looked at early on because you can spend a lot of time staring at a picture not having the slightest idea what kind of "cylinder" you're looking for.

The game can be extremely frustrating when you first start playing (which is where I still am right now), but according to my family the fun really starts to pick up once you start to memorize what things look like and where they usually lie.  Normally "the game gets better later" isn't much of a motivation for me to play something unless it turns into solid gold, but again, it's an okay time filler.