Samantha Swift and the Hidden Roses of Athena

Just finished playing it. Took me 3 hours to beat. The genre is “Hidden Objects Game.” It means you look at a picture full of things scattered around. You have a list of items to find. Add 1+1, and that’s half of the gameplay in this genre. The second half is usually puzzles with a bit of interaction. How do you tell which one is good? Easy. Were any of the items so obscured or downright hidden that you couldn’t find them without a hint? If your answer is yes, then this is a bad HOG. Did a solution to a problem make no sense? If your answer is yes, then this is not a good HOG. Was the “clickable” area of an item so tiny that you needed several clicks to trigger it? If your answer is yes, then it’s not a good HOG.

Plot. Well… I’ll ask you to forgive me in advance due to the fact that I have nearly 100 HOG games finished, and they all usually have very similar plots. Even if it’s fresh in my memory, all I remember is this: there is a young adult girl named Samantha Swift. She’s an archaeologist. She was doing her job in the ruins of Athena’s temple in Greece and found the scepter of Zeus. But her rival archaeologist—or more likely a tomb raider—named Ravena Stryker mugged the scepter out of Samantha’s hand. But fear not, Samantha found the shield of Athena, which has a secret that can be solved by collecting six rose stones scattered around the world and placing them in the shield.

Words from my experience: this HOG is an older one, pre-2010, made in Russia. In my opinion, all the good HOGs were made in Poland during the time period of 2011 to 2020. So I recommend skipping this one since there are so many better ones. Remember how I wrote about how to tell apart a good HOG from a bad one? All the bad qualities are in this game. There are even game-breaking bugs. Not much else to say about this game.