Ghost Files: The Face of Guilt

Ghost Files: The Face of Guilt is a pretty enjoyable hidden-object adventure with a darker crime-investigation theme. I liked playing as a detective and following the clues to figure out who was behind the murders. The story kept me interested, and there are plenty of locations to explore along the way. It's a good choice if you're looking for something relaxing rather than a really challenging puzzle game. Enjoy :)

Ghost Files: The Face of Guilt 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 (like this), many of them free on mobile app stores (like this), but this one will cost you money on Steam. There's a ghost hunter 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, as a mobile app, this doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. The game features somewhat lazy, simplistic "retro" looking 2D graphics, of the type you normally expect to see in low effort Flash/browser games and mobile apps. Considering this is being evaluated as a PC game, having the g…

The game works (which I wish I could take for granted), and the puzzles were pretty good, so I'll recommend it. The protagonist, setting, mystery, lore, and killer's motives are all annoying, make no sense, or are just plain dumb, so be warned of that. The writer really thought they were doing something deep with this one, and didn't realize the inconsistent tone and the protagonist's barely explained superpowers stripped any narrative weight the story might have had RIGHT OFF and threw it in the trash.

[u]Recommendation[/u]: This is a middle-of-the-road hidden object game that's fine for fans of the genre but not a good exemplar for players trying this type of game for the first time. [u]Critique[/u]: A lot of the stuff that I liked about this game could be viewed as negatives. It's definitely a shorter hidden object game, it's not made much more difficult by having a lot of vague names of objects, and it doesn't have to be played twice for achievements. The voice acting/directing is decent, but the English translation is pretty bad in places (like all the Artifex Mundi games, you can always understand what the game is trying to communicate, but the language is often very awkward with humorously wrong syntax, missing articles, etc: "I need something thinly to open this"). While there aren't a lot of instances where you are looking for "pipe" or "cloth" or anything similarly vague which could mean many different things, sometimes you are looking for things that just have the [b]wrong[/b] name (for example, you are tasked to find a "caliper with pen" when what you're really trying to find is a compass and pencil). The game is pretty linear, so you don't get stuck with having to…

Great game,... ...but the "black" queen is the opposite color...just be aware. Typos start appearing mid game. "nedle". "Frendly" "loking". Matching rooms with dots puzzle was confusing as heck and had wrong image of rooms list with no numbers or dots. YT video had right image, but still confusing. Why is every phone missing its handset cover? Why does EVERY SINGLE AM game have an unrealistic push key through lock land on newspaper sequence!?! This is not how it even works! Locks only have ONE SIDE! Need a middle rating on this one.

excellent