f13.net forums - Azada - Big Fish Games

If you ever enjoyed Myst for the puzzles, and thought the story itself and the graphics got in the way, then Azada is the game for you.

In the Casual Games Industry, the current most popular format seems to be Seek & Find (or Hide & Seek) games. The formula for such games is fairly straight forward. You're presented an onscreen visual and a list of items to find. You might find then with a simple click. You might find them behind a door that needs to be unlocked with a key. You might find them under a floorboard that needs to be pried open with the hammer you got from the toolchest that was under the workbench which was behind the box which was too heavy to move until you emptied its contents.

The games all seem to range from static-image-interesting to animated. Some games throw in a few interstiticial activities, like a memory-matching game, or some sort of block/slider type thing.

Azada throws everything in.

At first things seem pretty normal. Nice images, great sound effects, a light somewhat interesting story. But then you get into the memory games, the sliding puzzles, discerning patterns, revealing numbers with ink National Treasure style, finding images that are inverted, flipped and blurred, completing jigsaw puzzles with no guide, figuring out lock combinations, all both as intersticial gamelets and within the environments themselves. And the story gets interesting along the way without being the old style cutscenes you'd ESC passed.

It's a very interesting game, with a very steady climb into complexity. It's the kind great for folks like me that felt the thing that got most in the way of Myst was the storyline, heretical though that sounds.

I rate this a Rent It only because, as usual with PC download Casual games, it is free to play for upwards of 60 minutes. That's plenty of time to determine whether it's your thing.
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Rent it

(Sent in by Darniaq)