This is one of those games where you sit around the TV with your family and play through a few scenes each night. It's basically a mixture of "find the listed objects scattered in the scene" with some mild puzzle games, with a straightforward plot heavily inspired by a certain movie about a whip-toting archaeologist. The art is cartoony, which made finding most of the objects in the scene a pretty simple exercise as they stick out like a sore thumb. A few are better hidden, but nothing stumped us for more than a minute or two. The fact that the cursor sparkles when you hover over interactive areas of the scene where tools need to be used made searching somewhat redundant, and there didn't seem to be any means of turning that off. Still, it's all pleasant enough, and a fine diversion if you like this kind of thing. You'll know if you do.

Hidden Roses of Athena is an old hidden object game with a cute visual style and a typical Saturday morning cartoon treasure hunt adventure storyline.

I’ll be blunt: the existence of this game on Steam is a mystery to me. Samantha Swift and the Hidden Roses of Athena is the first entry in a hidden object game series that started in late 2008—an age where hidden object games were a lot different from the ones we know nowadays. Additionally, the publisher released it here five years later, with a price tag that would have been atrocious back then, let alone today.

Still, if we look past all of these, we find a cute little ancient HOG under the 800×600-pixel exterior. Hidden Roses of Athena is your typical cartoonish treasure hunt adventure, where we accompany an archaeologist on a trip all around the globe, looking for the titular roses of Athena. The story is cute and the hidden object scenes are surprisingly good for their time, so, in the end, it is a game one can have much fun with—if they can get it at a reasonable price and do not mind the ancient graphics.

Samantha Swift gives me odd fond feelings of nostalgia of the late 90s-2000s era. When a lot of games were all about travelling the world, uncovering clues, ancient mysteries, and hunting for treasure; it gives me memories of Broken Sword, Adventures of Tintin, Carmen Sandiego, and Indiana Jones. The art is very lovely, it has those 2000s type comic books-feel too like WITCH and Duck Tales.

Pros:
> Fun, simple story with that fun sense of child-like adventure
> Lovely character art
> Neat little puzzles
> Museum to look at lovely li'l artifacts

Cons:
> HO scenes were a bit too easy and kind of messy, the items strewn about were kind of awkward
> The quality of HO scenes ranged from really bad to strangely beautifully painted? (There's only one super detailed painted scene, it was really weird that the quality jumped from awkward clip art on a flat background, to fully shaded objects on a fully shaded background)
> Hint button doesn't really work well sometimes, you have to click it a few times before it registers what you want

It's pretty expensive for a really outdated, way too simple game. I think $5 or less would be enough for it. What mostly kept me going was the nice character art and fun story, but the gameplay itself felt tedious at times, especially since you had to find the same items over, and over, or kind of lame that the items you're looking for are staring you right in the face. The puzzles were fun though, it got a lot more interesting toward the end. Rome, England, and Tibet were the most fun for me.

I recommend getting it on a sale, it's a nice game overall if the price is right.

Not a great game but it's ok.

Pros:
- I found no bugs (Win 7 64bit)
- The game is neatly split into chapters
- There's a couple of different puzzles here and there
- Cheaply bundled

Cons:
- Some thin elements require spam clicking to get them
- Medium production values: drawing is not great, no voice acting
- Several reports of bugs
- No achievements (if you care for those)

Samantha could be Indiana Jones' relative (but she is not). :) I really enjoyed to play this little adventure of hidden object searching puzzle game. :) Setting is really nice, graphics are lovely. Puzzles are not too complicated, but some of them make you think of what to do next. I like the scanner option that shows you the shape of the item from the list once you click on its name. And if you make too many mistakes the scanner breaks for few seconds. I had really not many moments where I had to use the hints (which you collect by searching for a thunder symbol).
I won't spoil anything, but I will just say that I really like the end of the game, so I really recommend to play it to see it. ;)

This one is a hard one. On one hand it is a ok old school hidden object game where each scene is a just a pure HOS or a minigame. On the other hand so many people have issues running the game (myself included both on Windows and with Proton on Linux) and the developers haven't bothered updating the game since 2014.

I got it more or less to work with Proton 7.0-3 (older versions wouldn't work for me), but it still had issues starting 2x.

This is a very old game which doesn't have some of the gameplay conveniences that later Hidden Object games implemented (nor does it have any of the point & clicking activity, it's 95% hidden objects, yet it's not bothersome, I guess I was in the mood for some quiet clicking.)

Still, this Indy/Lara wannabe is pretty fun, and I really enjoyed her adventures and embraced the silliness and cliché quests. Yes, I have a hard time believing Sam would be able to infiltrate the Louvre museum at night and not meet a single watchman. That she'd find a secret place below the museum and would think it's okay to steal from it. That she'd receive help from locals in Tibet to steal a national treasure. That she'd find countless places that reportedly hadn't been visited in centuries, and yet managed to find modern items on her hidden object hunt. I'm pretty sure the Mayans didn't invent the microwave oven. (There's no microwave oven in the game, but you get my drift.)
(Spoilers following in the next paragraph, although the story is so obvious you won't mind)
..That someone would open their museum in a volcano (?) and actually call it 'Payne Museum'. That someone would steal back items from that museum, and mark their origin as 'Payne Museum' instead of, I don't know, 'Greece' for the Scepter of Zeus. 'Hey, guys, we stole from them alright, but they stole from us first!'
And finally, that Athena herself would find Sam worthy of yielding her shield and be deemed a hero, even though she kept stealing for her museum.

But despite all of that, it was fun, fun and fun, and I'll definitely play the other games in the series.

Note that some of the hitboxes for objects aren't exactly very forgiving. Also, I appreciated that Sam commented in speech bubbles from time to time, but if you're doing a click frenzy, they'll be dismissed immediately. I only realized near the end that you can repeat her last bubble by clicking her face... (Now that's a hint I'm giving you!)
And the resolution is really low. 800x600, I think..? You can either play fullscreen, which, meh, or launch in a window, and use the Windows key and +/- signs to manually increase the window size with the magnifier tool.

The price is an insult for this old game which runs as 800x600 and is nothing but a string of hidden object scenes one after another. Barely a low-rate story tying these scenes together.

Only recommended for under a dollar in sales and only if your desperate to play a HOG without any puzzles or good story. The pictures are nice enough, music is mediocre.

Samantha Swift is an "oldie goldie" series that is one of my favorites. Not exactly sure what the attraction is for me except the art style and a great story! It is basically one hidden object scene after another with a lot of puzzles thrown into the mix along with an engaging story.

I believe there are 4 games in the series and I have all 4 of them outside of Steam but decided to get the two that are offered on Steam. The two that are missing on Steam are: Samantha Swift: Mystery from Atlantis (3rd in the series) and Samantha Swift and the Fountains of Fate (4th in the series). Hopefully they will show up here also.

There are no Steam cards or Steam / in-game achievements so if those are your "thing", you will probably want to pass on Samantha Swift games. To me they are just a fun and entertaining way to spend an enjoyable evening!

I truly wish I could recommend this game as a fan of puzzles and storytelling in all forms. Regrettably, this title seems to be lacking in support or proper update since its release. I have successfully launched this game once despite attempting to play more than a dozen times at this point. When the game did launch for me, I found it to be a very simplistic HOG experience with no challenge to what scant few minigames or puzzle elements I encountered in the 45 minutes of playtime I was able to have before encountering a glitch and having to kill the game's process. If you pick this game up as part of a bundle (as I did,) I sincerely hope you get more out of it than I did. If you can play the game, do not expect too very much from it, and perhaps it will be worth a few smirks or groans of bemusement. The number of cliches and what-I-really-want-to-do-with-my-life-is-blog-about-my-cat-professionally level writing they have crammed into a small amount of space is in and of itself impressive. As an aside, despite this game not working out for me, I would not shy away from other titles from this publisher, as I have played several without issue.