Arcana Sands of Destiny

"Arcana Sands of Destiny" is a Hidden Object puzzle game, the type you normally see on mobile app stores or even as browser apps. There's literally hundreds of these on Steam, mostly published by Artifex Mundi, many of them free on mobile app stores, but this one will cost you money on Steam. There's a ancient egyptian theme to the game, but this is a just a veneer over a tired and overdone set of hidden object minigames and Adobe Flash tier puzzles, wrapped together with a bunch of static screens that you "move" through by tapping your finger on your iPhone screen. While these kinds of games are popular amongst casual gamers, it's difficult to argue this is a great value proposition as a PC game, especially considering the price of this compared to the hundreds of free HOGs on the mobile app stores. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. …

The game is barely positive. Interesting story and puzzles. You can't get out of a puzzle until you pass it. It is not very obvious what you have to do or place. It's hard to see. Some of the puzzles are annoying. The action is quite slow in every respect. The ending is not interesting. Bonus levels are terribly boring. They could have drawn the heroine a little better, you don't know if she is a girl or a boy. Brief with the guide and achievements. For 2020, it looks quite old. Preferably with a big discount.

This is horrible

nice artwork, lots of puzzles. some of the items (scarabs) you need to collect for the quests were need to be collected in order, so had to keep going back to them until it worked which was a bit frustrating. there are some good lets plays on youtube if you get stuck and are wanting to not use the hint button for the achievement.

Many things to do and a lot of thought has to go into it. Some are easy and some are tough. Get rid of the mummies so we can all go home! Love this game.

This game was interesting to compare against Artifex Mundi games in the same genre, but unfortunately for this one the comparison mostly made me realize that Artifex Mundi does a lot of stuff well that I wasn't giving them credit for. Relative problems with this game: * The hidden object segments are mostly hiding things by making everything sepia, rather than by clever design. * The hidden object segments hide objects such that they're not even on the screen, without indicating that it has done so (*sometimes* it does indicate, which makes this even worse!) * The map doesn't indicate where there's stuff still to do, and for half the game there is no map. * The non-map navigation is just awful - the mouse turns to an arrow in completely arbitrary parts of the screen sometimes, and there's no indication of why, e.g. "up-left arrow from this basically empty area" leads to "a wall full of spiders", like if someone told me the three exits from a room lead to [description of where they go] and asked me to predict which of the three exits goes to which of the destinations, I would have not even an educated guess. * The story animations take forever, in a really uninteresting way. For ex…