PwerlvlAmy

User Score
7.0

Presentation - 8.0
Gameplay - 8.0
Value - 8.0

It all starts here.

Enigmatis: The Ghosts Of Maple Creek is a point and click adventure game by Artifex Mundi. Marking the first game in the series trilogy, Maple Creek takes you on a journey of mystery and danger as you uncover all the secrecy surrounding the little town of Maple Creek. Can you solve the riddle of what is going on?

Story:

Take the role of a determined detective as you enter Maple Creek in order to solve the mystery of a missing girl. As the main character, you wake up in a crashed vehicle, completely confused as to what events had just taken place. How did I crash? where am I? what happened? where is the little girl I need to find. As the detective you must journey around the town of Maple Creek and solve puzzles that unlock the full mystery of what has transpired here, and only then will everything truly be illuminated. 

Game play:

For those new to the series, the majority of the game play involves lots of puzzle solving, finding hidden objects, and uncovering pieces of evidence that will help you solve the mystery quickly. People familiar with the point and click genre immediately know the type of thing I am talking about here. You must move your cursor around one screen at a time and pick and choose where you want to go to next, whether it be another room or maybe even down a different path. It all depends on where you want to go at that specific moment in time. Searching every single thing is key to this game, leave no stone un-turned.

Once you have picked whichever direction and route you want to go in, you will presented with either a scenario or set piece that allows you to look around that specific area in search of any clues or hints that you can find. This is where the game shines and gets a lot of fun, for at the games core, this is a murder mystery game.  You must find various objects ranging from pieces of paper to use as new evidence,photos,keys and other objects that will help you unlock new doors,new passageways and unlock new routes in order to get further through the game. Some items you find will not be usable till later, so hang on them!

Your character does not have any weapons in this game, you're squarely a detective who just goes around searching and piecing together a mystery, but, you do get a few items that help you along your journey, such as a map,mini game skip,evidence journal and a notebook that tells you all your current objectives and things you need to do in order to move the story along. You will find yourself using the evidence journal the most. The others? not so much.

The mini game skip technique can only be used once every thirty seconds, what this allows you to do is if you have trouble and  can't figure out a mini game puzzle or you just don't want to be bothered wasting your time with it, you just go boop! and click it and it will skip the mini game and solve the puzzle for you. This is extremely effective for people who get frustrated easily, I know I had to use it a few times during a livestream I made of the game because I either couldn't do it myself right away or I really wanted to see where the story went next. Use at your own leisure, but try to figure out the puzzles at least a few times for yourself, it will feel very rewarding. 

Your evidence journal acts just as that, an evidence journal, and in this journal is where you will have to gather every piece of evidence you have collected so far in the story and piece them together one by one. Some of the items you find will work in one category, such as, killer,motive or other categories similar to that, but other times these pieces of evidence might not even become relevant till the end of the game.  This is what makes the game really fun because you're constantly trying to piece together the story by yourself, as if you have become the detective of the game. Makes you feel immersed, at least that's what it did for me.

Throughout the game you're going to meet multiple different characters, some of who'm are extremely helpful and others you either just don't like or they're evil to the core that are not to be trusted. I will not say who these characters are for the sake of spoiling the surprise, but they're all integral to the feeling of mystique the developers try to get you to feel. While some of them might have brief appearances, they still do enough to keep you invested enough to care about them during their time on your screen. 

However, with all good, does come the bad. Yes like the broken clock that I am, I am stating this once more. There is one problem with this game that I felt happened too often and I felt there was an over abundance of, and this has to do with the mini game collection/matching puzzles.  In these mini games you're presented a screen with a ton of items layed out for you to click on and on the bottom of the screen it tells you what you're looking for. So say if you see ''horse shoe'' at the bottom of the page, you must look through the picture and find that horse shoe, and so on and so on. But these are not spread out that well at all, there are far too many of them and a lot of the time it felt like I was just going from one of these mini games to the next with very little substance in between. If you have read my review of Enigmatis 2, the sequel , then you know they did a better job in this category in that game than this one. 

Environment:

Like Enigmatis 2, the art style is still really good. You would think that it being the first game in the series that this game would be lower quality than its sequel in this department because that's usually the trend,right?. Well I'm happy to say the trend was bucked here and this game looks great. Everything is nice and smooth, everything is well drawn,animated well and looks very comic booky in a way. I have no quarrels with anything in relation to graphics or art design what so ever. Just a really good job.

Overall thoughts:

My final thoughts after live streaming this for around 4 hours and beating it are overall positive. It brings you into the world the developers wanted you to experience and showcases just what the series has to offer. Engaging characters, twists and turns, fun puzzles that can be head scratchers and a good set up that leads into the next two games in the series, this game was a pleasure to play. Even with the shortcomings I felt it has with the repetitive mini game collection puzzles. I say give this one a go if you like this genre or if you have the time and money to do so. 

Enigmatis: The Ghosts Of Maple Creek is out now on Playstation 4