I recently sat down with another adventure game, this time Aidem Media’s City of Secrets, fully expecting to find a similar experience to other point-and-click titles from earlier reviews. There are many similar designs and ideas between all adventure games but the unique setting and charming characters in City of Secrets help to set it apart from the pack. We are all familiar with clicking and moving our characters, reading or listening to sometimes massive piles of text, fumbling our way through sometimes great and often horrible puzzles and scratching our heads when an obvious (in hindsight) solution isn’t so obvious. The adventure genre is as filled with repeats and bland designs as any other, but City of Secrets puts out enough original content to make it noteworthy.
Name: City of Secrets | Developer: Aidem Media | Category: Adventure | Players: 1 | Version: 1.2 | Size: 287 MB | Price: Free |
Players will take control of a sluggish mole character as he searches for his canine companion, the only one in existence. I am reminded of Penny’s dog on Inspector Gadget when I see Rex, the skinny, upright dog who becomes lost and sends the mole hero on a wacky trip through silly characters and sometimes confusing text. The voiceovers are top-notch, for sure, but they often sound as though they were voiced from someone who spoke English only as a second language. Don’t get me wrong, I like the voiceovers and the ones in City of Secrets do not disappoint but they often feel a bit off-center. Some of it reminds me of something TV’s Perfect Strangers loveable Balki would say if he had the chance to star in an adventure game. (Google him.)
The game’s humor is obviously more geared towards children or drunk people. It’s all a bit too surreal to really follow closely, and the gameplay and hint system are not hard to work through but hard to follow. I didn’t really feel invested in the characters and so I did not feel the need to pay much attention to the text or puzzles when I knew that the game would generally work itself out. City of Secrets is really a city of hidden bits of information instead of cryptic clues and puzzles. All a player has to do is click around until the information shows itself.
When compared to more mature titles like Broken Sword, City of Secrets falls a bit flat. The art work is wonderful, however, looking like hand-painted pictures out of a children’s book. Many of the locations were original and fun, while most of the characters seemed charming. Oddly enough the mole character was boring when compared to Rex the dog, and I hope that any new adventures starring the two will feature Rex more than anyone.
The interface generally works well, although I am not sure how cleanly it would respond on screens smaller than the 7 inch Nexus 7 tab I played on. Some of the icons and clickable areas were tiny so I can only imagine that they would be frustrating on a phone or player. It’s possible that many of the apps and games on the Play market need some more time to adapt to the growing popularity of tablets like the Nexus. Botched control attempts were luckily rare but still aggravating. There is a scene that asks players to pick put vegetables, for example, sometimes resulting in a misplaced click that sends the character back to another screen. It made me wonder how it was possible to complete on something like my older HTC Inspire.
Adventure games can be a ton of fun or possibly very touching. City of Secrets is a bit too odd to make me feel much emotion. Again I think it would be great for a younger player or someone who is brand new to adventure titles, but for those of us who are used to adventure titles being some of the most challenging or mature games around, City of Secrets will basically feel boring. I wasn’t compelled to help the mole find his canine friend and I wanted to get the puzzles out of the way instead of feeling like I was immersed in the search for a solution. Does this mean you should skip City of Secrets? Of course not. Even some of the more bland adventure games can be more fun than many of the best shooters or typical physics-puzzlers, and for such a low price you really get more varied gameplay than almost anywhere else.
Grab City of Secrets, just don’t expect to be dreaming about it in your sleep.
