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

You can download Secret City: The Human Threat here.

To view the comments and access the link to the Collector's Edition, click here.



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

Happy gaming!

Thanks, Marian!

Ana

Thanks, Marian.

Thanks Marian.

Thanks Marian!

I just finished playing this game. I have liked all the games in this series so far, because they had their own twists and turns, novel puzzles, and were challenging enough to keep me coming back for more. I wasn't crazy about some of the super-saturated colors, but I cared about the characters and was intrigued by the story line. This episode was a big disappointment, not because of brevity or artwork or whatever, but because it was so flawed as to tempt me to bail on it. Here is what I mean:

1. Early in the game, I encountered one of those dreadful "Rotation" puzzles, where you have to swap and rotate all the pieces to assemble them into the proper array. OK, not my favorite, but I slogged through it ~ only to reveal that there was ANOTHER, identical one right under it. I gritted my teeth and slogged through the second one ~ and then there was a THIRD one! At this point, I looked at the Game Manual (I bought the CE version) and it showed there were FOUR of the exact same puzzle stacked one atop the other. WTH? Not all that fun the first time or the second, but four times straight?

2. I stumbled into a piano keys/ music puzzle. Fine. I don't mind them. I played the piano, so it is familiar ground and fun to tweak around. But this one was blindly random, never making sense at all. What were you supposed to be doing to solve it? Total "stab in the dark" stuff. There was no way to work on it except by blind repetition, failing over and over again and becoming none the wiser for your effort. That isn't a "puzzle," to me. A puzzle is where you have a task that reveals its strategy as you struggled with it. I finally looked up the Game Manual again, and the way they described solving it made clear that it was random and not amenable to an approach of "solving" it. Nonsense.

3. Arcade Sequences. There were multiples of these, shooting stuff on a timer, and they had to be repeated multiple times in order to get through that patch. I don't buy "thought" games to play shooter scenes.

4. Telescope Puzzle. In this one, you have explore a sky full of stars, zooming in and out while rotating the telescope's three lenses and figuring out which of the many arrangements of three stars is the one that the puzzle has you seeking. There are lots of "threes" and you are faced with having to try every one of the possible combinations of three stars. I actually did that for a while, then ~ once again ~ took a look to see what the Game Manual said was the right answer. What I found is that I had achieved the right answer already, but the puzzle did not reward me with a Solve. At that point, I skipped the puzzle again. This was not the only puzzle in the game that did not "solve" once I had completed it. I would look up the Game Manual to see why it didn't work, and it always showed me my own solution as the proper configuration.

I did finish the game, but it was more with a sense of relief than with any feeling of disappointment that the game was finished. I have never bailed on a game unless it failed to run, but I came near with this one. Secret City was one of my favorite series because of challenge, length and creativity. They totally blew it on this one. I will think long and hard about buying the next game in this Series.

Sorry you had so many problems with the puzzles in this game. I did play this game and remember that I skipped a few of the puzzles, but it was because I was feeling lazy and didn't want to bother solving them (I do this, telling myself that I will do the puzzles on a replay). I don't remember there being arcade sequences to speak of, so I must have found them either easy or unobtrusive. I have a hard time mustering up the patience for those rotation puzzles.

Thank you for your thoughts on the game.

This reviewer liked this one better than the previous installments and has good things to say about the puzzles. Something for everyone, right?

For sure. Fortunately, there are LOTS of games to choose from and no one has to pick just one game or one series.

Yes, there are so many to choose from! We are spoiled.