A Haunting Novel: Surfaced Secrets ★★★☆☆

Where can you buy?

• Available on Steam

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Explanation to Negative Feedback

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Cluttered UI

I’ve got the Collector’s Edition when purchasing this game, and because of that, there’s a guide you can look at in case you get stuck. I never got stuck, but I want to say the the guide is an open case icon on the lower right, next to an oversized hint bottle.

Like, way oversized.

The kind of oversized where you’ll have to watch where you click because you have a chance of accidentally clicking that hint icon.

Further up on the right side of the screen is a button for the menu, which is weird that it’s just floating there. The task and map icons are located on the lower left and they aren’t as large as the hint button, but there’s still just as intrusive, and all of it combined just makes for a loud and obnoxious UI.

Honestly, I don’t even know why there’s a need for the map because there really isn’t much in the ways of backtracking.

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Explanation to Positive Feedback

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Interesting hidden object scenes

The HOG scenes aren’t always your typical one where you’ll have to find items that match the words listed on the bottom bar, but they are still around. The main real difference with this game is the fact you’ll be moving items around in the scene in order to find the hidden items you have to click on.

Luckily, there’s no click penalty that I encountered, and I played on hardcore mode. The concept of moving things to find hidden things is a bit annoying though.

A lot of times you’ll have images that you’ll have to match up with in the scene itself, which is kind of more fun, in my opinion. Let’s you focus a bit more.

Variety of puzzles

In a lot of HOGs I’ve played, the directions for certain puzzles can be horribly confusing to figure out, so you’ll just have to understand the puzzle yourself. This game, honestly, does a pretty good job on explaining what to do in the puzzles, and it kind of helps that a lot of the puzzles are fairly easy in their design and execution.

The puzzles are all quite a bit different, and while some of them can take a little while to do, and there’s one that just confused me on how I was even completing it, there was another that I just couldn’t figure out and needed a bit of help on.

So while they’re all unique, and most are on the easier side of things, there are a couple that might be head-scratchers.

No backtracking

We have a map, and I don’t really understand it because I never looked at it, and there’s not a lot of backtracking to begin with. In fact, sometimes when you find an item, you might be using it in the same area.

Also, there are different sections you go to within the game, which stops you from backtracking in the areas that you had been in before. So when you do get into a new area, there are maybe 3-4 sections to it.

Not a lot of ground to cover.