All of the Lost Lands games are pretty good, and as succeeding chapters were issued, they just got better. I finished this latest game yesterday, and can't recommend it strongly enough. It is a HUGE game by "Casual Games" standards, took many days to finish it, lots of places to go and explore, great graphics, above average voice acting, interesting characters, and pesky mini-games (which you can Skip if you set the game that way). There are HOG scenes, but not an oppressive number, and there is more to them than find the squash racket and the bowling ball in the hold of the pirate ship (ha ha). Each is a "puzzle" in its own right, and are "thematic" to the game world.
The game comes with the usual Map that you open up as you find the pieces, and you can teleport around. This is very handy because there will be things you find to do at the very beginning of the game, but you won't find the things you need to do that until much later on. This means note-taking will be important, unless you have set the game to tell you where the Action Items are located. Of course, you can take your own notes, which I did, and check things off. In some cases, you will need to do some note-taking or solving a puzzle with paper and pencil. I loved it. There are pieces of a manuscript to find (easy seen in any scene in which they appear) and you get the back story from them; once you find them all, I think it opens an extra chapter (I'm a bit hazy on that).
There are Morphing Objects and Collectibles in each major scene, but if you don't care to look for them, I don't think it matters whether you do or not. I kind of enjoyed checking them off the list. There is a bonus game in the CE version that makes it is worth the extra price. Actually, rather than being an addendum to the story, it is a prequel that explains what happens to the main character when she first makes the jump to the Lost World; another example of how this game tweaks the usual formulas for the this genre.
There are a couple of scenes where you have to load and aim a canon or use a telescope to find an image, but they aren't a challenge. Not arcade/platform stuff at all.
As I said, this one is now at the top of my list of Favorites from a couple of hundred games. I definitely look forward to replaying it when sufficient time has passed to let me forget the particulars. Don't pass it up!
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