Today's game for Club Members, tomorrow's game for all.

You can download Moonsouls: Echoes of the Past Collector's Edition here.



As always, please remember to come back and tell us what you think.

Happy gaming!

Thanks, Marian!

Ana

Mad Head has really been busy lately.

Thanks Marian for the heads up on this game and several other games posted in the last 2 weeks, your dedication to keeping us up in the loop is much appreciated.

I tested Moonsouls for 15 minutes and I liked it enough to buy on this week ends TOGO sale. Although I only played it briefly, I liked the graphics and the New-ish style of the game, looking forward to playing this game after I finish off a couple of the others not yet played.

That sounds really good, Starcom. Good to hear from you, and good to know that you are still playing HOPAs.

Please give us more of your thoughts and opinions on these games when you get a chance.

Thanks, Marian. I have found the MADHEAD games (as well as ELEPHANT games) to be a notch above some of the rest. This one sounds interesting. I'll check it out.

Update: I played the Demo and it is different enough for me to really like it. A pretty straightforward HO-Adventure, and I probably will purchase it at the next Two-Fer sale.

Also, I recently found Graven: The Purple Moon Prophecy, and just played that Demo, too. It is the usual story of an evil entity re-awakening with plans to end the World, but I'm not dealing with that fellow yet, just finding my feet, exploring, etc. I find it much more like an Adventure game than most I've played. It is quite intriguing, with some new play elements and points of view. It definitely has a "foreign" feel to it, at least to me.

The game has a repetitive sound music track that, unfortunately, you can only turn down by turning down the overall Sound. The puzzles are easier than I like, but that is not a big deal, not a buzz-killer.

The two HO scenes I encountered were interactive rather than being passive Find-the-Umbrella stuff, and the contents are what you would expect to find in that given environment. This really helps keep you "in" a story, as opposed to looking for a pair of skis and a bowling pin in a story set in ancient Egypt.

OK, so Moonsouls is behind me. Not bad. It has all the usual Casual tropes: Collectibles (a graphic and a morphing object in each major scene), not too many HO scenes (most with morphing objects in them), and an evil entity triggering the drama and needing to be vanquished. There may be hints of timed sequences (a bomb ticking, for instance,) but it is only "Game World Time," so no stress. I did stumble on a few of the Collectibles but didn't get some big In-My-Face celebration about it to annoy me (you can't turn off any of the pop-ups). There are a few welcome tweaks on the HO scenes, themselves.

After what begins like an old country story with a traveling wagon of tinkerers, the story explodes wide open ~ into space ~ with different environments throughout the rest of the game, all themed by space travel and an ultra-high-tech society. Sort of like the simple farm boy (Luke) who gets drawn into space to battle the villain (Darth and the Empire) ~ only his Uncle gets to come along for the ride this time, instead of being barbecued.

What I liked about the game is that you aren't treated as though you are stupid, there are no cheap shots, and many of the tasks are challenging to figure out. OK, sometimes you struggle because they don't make clear what you are supposed to do, but hey. ha ha There is no brutality or on-screen violence. With two exceptions, none of the puzzles is even remotely difficult. I don't remember being able to tweak the difficulty in anything related to the game. It is what it is, and for many, that will be just fine.

My one complaint is about two standout puzzles that are SO FAR out of the league of everything else in this game as to knock you out of the game. One is a boxing puzzle that gives you none of the usual clues about how you are doing (so how are you supposed to "learn"?). In another puzzle, you have to arrange some wires by shifting their plugs to locations where their glyphs clearly indicate they need to be inserted. This might have been difficult enough, since the glyphs are bizarre alien complexities and all the wires are ensnared in a tangled pile, but to solve it, you have to 1) memorize these complex glyphs well enough to match them up mentally, 2) trace the wiring to find out where each one is supposed to go (while it rotates), and 3) you can only move them in pairs. All of this together was a level of difficulty above the pay grade of this game. If you encountered it in one of your full-blown Adventure Games, you might relish it, but it doesn't seem to me that it belongs in a simple casual. (I later looked up the Strategy Guide and it gave a 61-move solution for this puzzle.)

But if you are OK with skipping a couple of puzzles, this game is great fun. My hubby walked by while I was playing, and even he was interested in the art work and theme.

That was a great read, Reenie. I assume when you said that you can't change the difficulty level of the game you meant that you can't change the puzzle difficulty? Because when the game begins, it does give you a choice of difficulty levels - I remember that from the demo.

Not that it would have made a difference: The Easy ones still were laughably easy, and the Hard ones could have been made harder, so that oddity still would exist.

I enjoyed reading the Reenie, too. I may give Moonsouls a test drive.