Alex Hunter: Lord of the Mind. This one is another tedious “hidden objects” game. It’s because I’ve beat so many of that genre. I think I’ve burned out my fun receptors for any hidden objects game. As usual I felt a lot of “why did I pick this item” and “what do I do with this item”. And puzzles, ugh those puzzles were so annoyingly boring that I skipped a record amount of them this time, six to be precise. Man… burnout is a female dog, I swear I used to enjoy hidden objects.
Anyway it’s plot time. We are detective Alex Hunter…. Remember the rule if the HOG’s protagonist is not young women in her early twenties you’re doing it wrong. Why? Because the main target audience for HOGs are women. Back to the plot. We are veteran detective that seen a lot of action during our career, but this case is special. Young lass by the name Emily Patterson hired us to find her missing father Isaac Patterson. She’s already tried the police but coppers hadn’t found anything useful so far. She doesn’t have any clue either so she just gives us the key to her house. Ay’ let’s get to it. We poked around for a while and found out the Emily’s father is a professor in the field of human consciences and he recently received a letter from man calling himself Doctor Owens. In this letter Dr. Owens compliments Isaac’s achievements and invites him to combine their brains and efforts in order further advance this field of science. Okay that’s a start, let’s visit this hospital.
We have arrived so back to snooping around… I mean investigating. Okay we found that something shady going on. Psychiatrist Adam Smith went missing and he worked in the Owen’s hospital. We found him pretty quickly well at least his bare bones and fully intact clothes. Nah I bet they just didn’t want put a rotten carcass cause that’d be too gruesome. He even wrote a letter that he wanted to write to ensure his safety, guess that didn’t help. Anyway, in this letter he exposed Dr. Owens. Madman thinks he’s Madara Uchiha and wants to mind control the humanity with his MacGuffin. Mr. Smith learned about this and other Owen’s experiments that lead to death of several his patients. We also learned from a newspaper that local clock tower is closed for “renovation” if you know what I’m saying. “Alrighty then” I said like Ace Ventura, our goal is clear. Find and save Isaac, prevent Dr. Owens from installing his gizmo in the clock tower. Clock towers are not places for weird gizmos it’s a place for orphan girls to flee to from their mad foster mother. But I think we are a little late with our second task because we found another article in a newspaper that said people started to blank out wander around. We need to hurry up and I hate being in a hurry.
We found Professor Isaac in one of the prison rooms. He informs us about something that we already know and asks us to stop Dr. Owens first. We try to but Dr. Owens manages to zap us with his mind control device and sends us into dream land to wander around. But we manage to break out of the control and confront him. Doctor then comically slips on the roof of the clock tower and falls down. Yay we’re done. It’s not the end there is also a bonus chapter, but to hell with that, my head hurting already.
Let’s just judge this HOG by my rules that I used in previous reviews. Does this HOG overuse HO scenes? Yes it does, not as bad as Twisted Lands: Ghost town but bad enough to be mentioned.
Are puzzles descriptions sometimes too vague to understand or do not provide enough information? Yes they are. Even more some puzzles as I mentioned previously hard to the point of no fun.
Did I ask myself “What the hell Do I need this for/Where Do I need to go now” more than 3 times? Yes I did. But it felt like “it wasn’t so bad”.
Did any of the HO scenes use barely visible items or words that are not commonly used in everyday vocabulary? Yes, but it wasn’t so bad.
Is there a fast travel? Yes, but’s for achievement sake you must not use this feature more than 5 times.
Does HO scene punish you for misclicking too much? No it doesn’t.
So let’s conclude. Skip or not? Honestly puzzles were so bad that I’m leaning heavily toward the “skip” side. Plus there are achievements related to not skipping too many puzzles, not using fast travel, not using hints too many times. That’s bad only if you care about achievements. Also, there are two versions of this game, one with the expired license and locked out achievements. Well what else? OST was forgettable, visuals are quite good and that’s about it. End result is skip, there are better HOGs than this one, play only if you are completionist who wants to play every HOG in existence.
HOGs usually have good visuals.
Once again forgettable ambiance
