Twisted Lands Trilogy Collectors Edition

Twisted Land Trilogy. It’s a 3in1 hidden objects Origin, Shadow Town and Insomniac. I probably should have started with origin, but I looked at a picture of mentally ill looking girl in a hospital and thought “Yeah that looks good”.

So let’s start with the Insomniac. Young girl wakes up from a nightmare and sees an anunnak reptiloid then her vision goes normal and it just doctor who’s been treating her. The doctor cheerfully informs her to get some rest and be prepared for her lobotomy. Good news! We are getting out of here. By the way girls name is Angel Brown we find out this from a newspaper where we also find name of our doctor, his name is Torpse. We try to escape via ventilation duct but we fall out of it and get injected with sedatives. Angles wakes up is completely different location with a school bus nearby. Oh! Another newspaper, let’s read it… wonderful, bus full of children went missing. I’m sure we are not related to this case at all. What else… an American tourist disappears in Spain with his wife named Angel… spectacular. We do some hidden objects stuff and find another newspaper. Local fisherman find an unconscious injured woman on a beach ambulance brought her to the local hospital to be treated by doctor Torpse… bla-bla-bla mad incoherent speech about some island… doctor think that the patient is delusional because there is no island nearby where she claimed it to be…. Angel then continues to go around changing from one world to another. I mean she wakes up from a nightmare, tries to escape from hospital gets injected with a sedatives and goes back to the nightmare several times through the game. And she keeps finding diaries about a town where all of its inhabitants went mad. You know, I even spoil you the ending. During our adventure we keep finding photos of the missing kids from that school bus, and we find almost all of them except for the center one. So after five attempts to escape, Angel finally manages to break free. She climbs down from the second floor, get ready, sees a school bus with door opened, hijacks it and drives away. That’s where the final photo poetically fills the last space on the picture of the class. Oh she also was the one who killed her husband due to intoxication from rare African tree that spreads toxic mist around itself as a defense mechanism. Hilarious. 

Now let’s move to Origins. Turn out this is the first part should have started with but whatever. So how does it start? We are a detective on a vessel cursing to some remote island in Spain called Tormente… sounds familiar? Man named Joaquin Huerta hired us to find what happened to his daughter Teresa Fuente. We barely managed to anchor and immediately got attacks by visions or ghost or some paranormal stuff. We snooped around for a while and found out that Teresa married some big doctor. Oh hey a newspaper “Dr. Torres’ house goes down in flames ”. I almost read it as Dr. Torpse. Lots of missing people hmm sounds exactly as Angel said in previous game. Bit more poking around and we find her along with her husband.  She says everything is okay nervously winking at us but detective didn’t take a hint. So she writes a letter to her father and as soon as we take it look at it invisible ink appears saying “HELP ME AND FIND MY SON” or something like this. What a blunder. Doctor drags Teresa away and shoots tank with that African plant which produces noxious toxins. Now we have to find way around. On our way we find few more residents of Tormente, one is granny who sells some stuff and another one is mad monk preaching about usual things like eternal damnation, impending doom and eternal suffering. Classic biblical stuff. Alright, more “Missing” posters, stray cat, empty school and graveyard. Oh what’s that? From another newspaper we find that people of Tormente suspects that shadowy cult managed to infiltrate town and started to do heretic practices. Some kid’s diary when he writes how he keeps seeing reptilian people running in the shadow stealing fish from fisherman nets. But as usual nobody believes the kid.  And in another dairy by old veteran Undiana Aturraga we get confirmation that kid in fact saw reptilian people. Undiana wrote how he kept reptilians away from his home with his trusty rifle. Eventually he run out of food and ammo so reptilians managed to starve him out. More missing people, now an entire circus troupe. At this point reptilian people discover us and chase to the Feuntes’ mansion. Eventually we wind Teresa and her son. But Teresa is sick and need to be treated with medicine made out of the same African plant called Umdglebi… oof.  So nothing to do here anymore we need to escape. Conveniently Dr. Fuente has a plane so we just need to fix couple of things and we good to go. We even take granny and mad monk along but not Teresa she’s infected with reptilianism and will soon turn into one of them. So with tears in her eyes she gives her son her pendant as memento and tells us to take off. Dang that’s sad, only Shadow Town left.

Shadow Town. Oh lord what turdshow it was and I mean gameplay wise and level design. Easily the worst of all three games in the trilogy. Well, we start on a small boat our characters are Angel and her husband Mark. Mark’s hobby is diving treasure hunting and Angel find buyers for those artifacts. I guess it’s not very legal but whatever. It was a fine sunny day in the ocean till Mark brought a crate from a shipwreck. Then weird thing started to happen Angel stabbed her husband he fell in the water… and woke up on a shore. Wife’s missing, boat’s crashed and we have no idea what time it is. First thing first Mark looked around found couple of places to investigate. First we went to an abandoned cruise ship. We found newspapers and diaries. After we read them we discovered that ten years ago in 1998 crew of construction workers arrived on a small uncharted island near Spain and couple days after they sent a distress signal but nobody was found.  Then from diary of the passengers we learned that cruise arrived on the same island due to some technical problems. While sailors and engineers tried to fix the ship passengers started to see suspicious shadows lurking near their ship. Couple of days later everyone started to get nervous, some sailors got injured by “wild animals” but there was doctor among passengers so sailor was saved from bleeding out. Few more days and people started to get cuckoo one already hanged himself the others started to eat raw fish. As you could’ve guessed they turned into reptilians and we are back in Tormente. We also learned that Mayor who’s brother to doctor Tores Fuente, sealed his wife in her room by building a brick wall. And since his wife was pregnant at the moment guess she didn’t try out jumping out of the balcony. Right Mark also found photo of him and his sister on that island but that was never explained. Anyway we finally managed to find our wife and save her from reptilians. Then we managed to escape on some bathyscaphe looking vessel. BUT HERE IS THE TWIST! Mark caught reptilianism, that’s why he didn’t drown when Angel stabbed him. He regenerated in the ocean water but managed to regain his humanity. And then we see how Mark for the first time since the accident looks at his reflection and sees a reptilian. Guess that means he’s not dead and just dropped of Angel and probably returned to Tormente.

Oh dear, now let’s get to the gameplay. While First and third games are in most parts are completely normal HOGs first one is the best imo. The second one… the second one is easily the worst as I previously said. Why? 

No map, you can even see the structure just no map at all.

Abuse of hidden objects scene, you’ll have to search through each one three to five times.

Some of the items in those scenes are so obscured you won't find the. Names on the list are misleading and vague you won't understand what are you looking for. Have fun with the homonyms. 

Puzzles, there are few of them but they are so bad that I nearly skipped all of them. Some are don’t even count as puzzles so there is no way to skip them. 

Backtracking, dear god you’ll be walking on the goddamned island back and forth till your shoes fall apart.

Items. For some reason this part decide to do like Germans do on an autobahn. If we have an inventory then we going to fill it to the brim with items. Some of those could’ve easily be plot items that can be put anywhere but your tool belt. 

Two others game did not have such annoying problems.

So in the end I want to say that while story is okay adaptation of Dagon novel but the second game ruined my mood so much that it’s not worth to suffer through it for other two games. And I didn’t even bother to check the bonus chapters. Enough is enough! Avoid. The scenery though looks beautiful enough.