Amaranthine Voyage: The Orb of Purity Collector's Edition

This is a fairly short HO game. It took me 5.5 hours to play both main game and bonus chapter. The devs have maintained the quality in this game but it was far too short and ended very quickly. The bonus chapter was good and was full of twists and turns. You are the leading expert on harmonium after all your travels. A professor friend contacts you when a man from another world falls through her new portal. He is ill and they don't know how to cure him. Kraixx tell you that his world is on the brink of destruction because the harmonium there has become imbalanced. It could affect Earth too. You go back to his world and have to dodge the Watchers who arrest anyone with magical abilities. As you travel Kraixx's world, you discover the backstory of his culture. It is well done and the graphics are beautiful at times. The music heightens the urgency of your quest. There is a twist in the tale (which I saw coming). There is a fair bit of backtracking, but you can fast travel through the map. The map highlights where you can go next. The HO scenes are varied which keep your interest. You have a popper game as an option if you can't find an object. The puzzles make you think…

The previous one in this series was good. I quite liked it, but not so much this one. If you're a fan of the genre, and it's on sale (below $10 US), it might be worth it. It's okay. Wasn't my favorite. It was a bit short. (Probably an hour less than what is shown.) The character's lips didn't even move. Some of the mini-puzzles were more creative than usual, so that's good. The hidden object scenes were boring to me. Sillouettes or just lists mostly, though they tried to mix it up in weird ways. Some might like them a lot, but they weren't to my taste. (There is a bubble popper game you can play in lieu of the hidden object scenes.)

Beautiful images, not difficult and fun to play.

excellent

This is a short game made artificially longer by having long multi-second UI transitions, intentionally slow dialogue control and map jump-to-location features, and is padded with 50% of the puzzles being some variation of match-2. Would have been 'meh' even without that

The entire Amaranthine series was an absolute joy to play. I can't wait for Steam to bring the rest of the series.