Hope Lake

Extremely 3/5. Many many worse hidden object games out there, but also many better ones. Story is fine, honestly though the puzzles are annoying - only like 1 or 2 that were fun to solve. The ending is the best part you'll see why lol made me love the protagonist in the ending.

It's mindboggingly easy, with heavy hand-holding and a plot as clear as day. The whole game also makes little sense (why are items where they are in the first place? why does the killer not kill the player the 62 times he has a chance to do so?). A point and click adventure straight out of the 90s, with none of the original charm.

first let me say that the art work and music were lovely. but realistically, that's the best i have to offer on this.
it's a huge storage hog for how short the game actually is.
if you cut out the back-n-forth, that is sadly common of this type of game, the game wouldn't exist Beyond the pretty music and nice graphics.
the puzzles would be okay if some of them didn't require Exact placement of the cursor. and don't get me started on how some of the items were oddly labeled... i spent more than five minutes on a couple of the hidden objects looking for a "key", ultimately to give up and have the hint point out a Wrench... or the time i spent looking for a "cog" when they meant a something that looked like a broach.
!warning: might run into "spoiler" territory!
the story is your typical revenge plot but falls drastically short of following through on some of the more interesting aspects. why pepper the "clues" with background lore that doesn't actually come into play except through a small pointless moment... was he really sacrificing the women or just haphazardly killing them while having a penchant for shiny objects? no idea. it's never really gets touched on other than as an aside.

Another thing that actually bothered me quite a lot was how they threw mental illness as being the cause of all the trouble. having a bad guy with a mental illness is tricky anyway. but if you seriously mishandle it, it Will come back to bite you. which is how i felt this ended up being. the bad guy was diagnosed as being untreated bipolar manic depressive.
okay, not good. but does that mean everybody with the condition that goes untreated will Always turn into a murderer? no. the story had so many other more viable reasons for his rampage but none of Those were fleshed out. they just lazily went, "yup, he's a mental sicko. nuff said. and we'll just leave all this other stuff laying around for players to trip over instead of doing a clean job of things from the beginning."

when all is said and done, the heavy file storage was not worth it. the pretty features it Did have did not make up for a lackluster, poorly handled game that Could have had a lot going for it if they'd honestly put in the effort.
i could be wrong... maybe they just didn't know what they were doing and this was their first attempt at making games. in which case, my apologies if feelings are hurt but it still stands that this needed more thought and time put into polishing it and making sure it wasn't going to start fraying at the edges when somebody looked too closely at it.

I did enjoy this game. There are a lot of locations, but the excellent map always points you accurately to where you have to go. Something I really appreciated was the flashlight, which you can use anywhere, even in the hidden object scenes. Nothing can hide in a dark corner. Very user friendly. The only quirk was the names of objects in the hidden scenes. Several of the scenes had one object with a completely wrong name, like the name had been randomly chosen. This was not a serious problem, since the scenes do not have a lot of objects. The game keeps moving, and it never got frustrating, thanks to the map.

This game is wonderful but after an hour of play it stops and asks to pay for playing other levels

I absolutely am crazy about this game the story keeps me intrigued and how hands on you get to be through out this story its the best game i have ever played.