This hidden object game is one that follows a story, but does not have many traditional adventure elements (some HOGs are more hybrids or adventure-lites, this isn't one like that outside of following a story). There were not many mini-games. The scenes are interesting along with the story. Decent music. Funky scene transitions remind me of a 70's low budget horror movie.

This is listed as "part 1" and so the story does not resolve at the end. It is also a tad shorter than some other HOGs and does not include a bonus chapter or an Unlimited Mode.

Each hidden object scene contains ten secret items (hover your cursor over the start to see what they are). You do not revisit scenes generally so if you want to find the secret items, you should find them right away.

Overall I liked the game but did find it difficult finding some items--they can be small, and some objects you are supposed to open or move to expose other items do not give a visual clue such as a cursor change.

This game can easily be called "Bad eyesight simulator." My eyes are hurting after playing this game.

The graphics are so low quality and blurry, I couldn't make out half of the objects in the scenes. The graphics looks a lot clearer on the screenshots as the image isn't stretched out like in the game. Sometimes I would just click wherever I found to be an obscure area as I couldn't be bothered trying to look for the actual item indicated. I feel not all your clicks registers correctly as I clicked the same object at least 3 times and not until I used to hint button it would actually register.

There's also a problem that there's no indication whether things can be opened or not. Sometimes you can open drawers or dig through the ground, sometimes not. As you get punished for clicking too often, you really waste a lot of blind clicks in hope of an area being able to open. Unlike other Hidden Objects games, there's no indication whether an object is hidden from view or not. And since you can't see half of the items anyway, you search blindly for something that is hidden behind something that might not open. Ugh.

Sometimes the game feels like it pulls a bad joke on you. You enter a room filled with books and papers scattered all over the place. What are you supposed to find? "Paper." Have fun! Oh, and not just any paper... but the one paper. You can't pick the wrong paper or you get no points. There are many scenes like this, where there's several of one item clearly on the screen and only one of them counts as correct.

The story was kinda... blah. Once things got somewhat interesting, some character just shows up on your screen and basically says "If you wanna know what really happened, you have to wait for part 2." and that's it. This game felt like a demo for a game, rather than being a full game on its own. And appearently there's supposed to be 3 parts of this story. They should at least have combined part 1-2 into the same game.

I love hidden-object games, but this one is awful.

There is nothing except hidden-object scenes: no puzzles or mini-games, nothing. Just one hidden-object scene after the other. And they are not good -- there are bugs with not clicking the right pixel even though you pick the right object, and very poor quality control. Too many scenes where you need to pick an object, but there are in fact more than one "gun" or "paper" in the scene. It's not satisfying to guess which one is intended. The UI features a map, but I have no idea why. There is no reason to go back to any scene: you just go through them until the end. And it won't take long.

The story is mind-numbingly dumb, even for this simplistic genre.

And there are bugs. Had to quit the game and restart to avoid weird lighting problems.

To make things even worse (is that possible!?) it's both short and unfinished. I really hope they don't waste time on creating a sequel.

Them - The Summoning is the first (and the last) entry in a proposed series, where you try to solve a murder mystery.

Story:

You play as Cian. One night your friend Grendel calls you urging you to come to his house right away, because something bad has happened and once you are there, he explains that his deceased wife Albea is haunting him and soon Grendel ends up dead and you're on the run trying to figure out what happened.

The story overall is nothing to write home about. It has an interesting set up and some interesting twists at the end, but overall the writing is pretty sloppy. The game ends on a pretty big cliffhanger, with the game originally intending to be a trilogy, but due to poor sales, those plans were cancelled and we won't truly find out what has happened to these characters or what most of those set ups meant.

Graphics:

The game is a Hidden Object Game and if you have played one of those you know what to anticipate. Each screen is filled to the brim with a bunch of stuff and then you have to search for things from a list. One thing I expect at the very least is high resolution pictures in a game like this so I can find items. This game doesn't have that. The pictures are pretty low res and it makes finding items a really big pain in the ass.

There's actually a few times a screen is reused with roughly any changes done to it. Another thing is the characters in the game are pictures of real life people which sort of don't fit in place with the rest, since they are slightly more high resolution, than the environments.

Audio:

One thing that would have helped this game immensely is voice acting and there's none of it here. I would have even taken some cheesy acting, just something to break up the terrible audio design. First of all I'll talk about the music. It's not good whatsoever, most tracks sound incredibly generic and they are put on a very short loop. Another thing is when you click a lot of times in a HOG game, it will give you a sound cue that you clicked too much and it was so annoying that I tried to click as less as possible, just to not hear that sound.

Gameplay:

Them - The Summoning is a pure HOG game, meaning there's not much else for you to do here. Each level you through lists looking for items and then do it over and over until the game is over. There's some slight deviations on this formula when it asks you to find differences in a picture or click on something in a row and there's also bonus stuff you can find in each level to give you extras (which are not worth it, cause it just unlocks a replay of that level).

There are some minor puzzles to solve, but I can barely call them puzzles, since they are so incredibly easy. Sometimes the game will literally tell you what to do. For example, the main character might say "I need to find a hidden tunnel, maybe I should break that wall over there". Those are the type of puzzles you will solve. I wish something more challenging was present.

The gameplay itself is super boring, not to mention with the low res graphics it was a pain to go through each level, looking for 20 items that basically blend into mush.

Verdict:

Them - The Summoning is not worth it, even to the hardcore fans of HOG games. Story that will never have a wrap up, low res pictures making hunting for items a pain and incredibly short even for a HOG, barely lasting 90 minutes. If you want a HOG game to pass the time, look elsewhere.

Final Rating:
3/10

Pros:
+ Semi interesting plot

Cons:
- Low Res textures make hunting items a pain
- Story ends on a cliffhanger, which is not going to get resolved
- Terrible audio design

If you liked this review please consider joining https://steamcommunity.com/groups/completingthebacklog and https://steamcommunity.com/groups/ImperialReviews

I got this game in a bundle. I got it for around less then .25 cents. I really want to enjoy this game but a lot of things hold it back from being great. One is the resolution issue. You cannot set the resolution to the size of your monitor so everything looks slightly fuzzy. Great. Its all hidden object play and that is fine by me. However the objects that your looking for are going to be fuzzy looking and they are all mostly super small and hard to see due to the resolution bug. Do not go for the special bonus items they do nothing. They open up the game you already finished. Wow some extra.

The story and cut scene graphics are fine. The game isnt all bad just not that enjoyable. The hint button recharges farily quickly and thats a good thing. I havent finished the game yet. May post more later when I finish it.

Just finished the game. So many things wrong with this game. Later your in a grave yard. You have to click on blank plots of land to find the object you need not once but 3 to 4 times. No markings that I could have seen. Just random spots on the ground. Great.

The objects that you need to find in this game are crazy. Here are just a few of the crazy names. Flippo Brunelleschi whoever he is. A gemhorn? What? Really? It also seemed like they got lazy at the end because a lot of the objects later on are right next to each other. Also the objects you need to find are super small and there is way to much clutter inside the rooms or areas you need to look thru. The story and sound effects are well done. The hidden object portion is not well done in my opinion.

Also the game is very short even for a Hidden Object game. Took me 2 hours to finish.

Avoid this one. Terrible graphics resolution makes it awful to play. The script is badly translated. There is no voice acting. The "extras" are just direct access to the same scenes you played in the game, for no particular reason. There is little story and the HOGs are cluttered and painful, requiring random clicking on non-specific areas and meticulous pixel hunting for objects that are indescernible or unrecognisable. It's about the worst HOG I've come across on Steam, and there are some pretty bad ones around. It's just as well the sequels didn't appear - 1/10.

An uneven hidden object game that largely removes everything apart from the hidden object scenes (there are a handful of inventory items but they are picked up during the HOG scenes, and a couple of spot the difference puzzles).

The story is okay with a few oddities such as in the policemans office, and when you start hammering walls when the police are searching the building for you, but the story is not really going to be why you would play this (especially as being part one of a planned three episodes of which the others don't seem to exist yet).

The game also isn't very long (1-2 hours depending on how much you want to resort to the hint button probably) and like most HOGs isn't particularly replayable. Still it can be picked up pretty cheap, so that isn't necessarily

So it all comes down to the hidden object scenes. Firstly the scenes are reasonably clear and the graphics are good enough, and most of the hidden items are decently placed, so the game is playable enough, but there are a fair amounts of weak links here - there aren't many misnamed objects (the bane of HOG games), but there seemed to be a few with dodgy hit boxes, a fair amount of silly places (pumpkin, stuff silhouetted in the sky, the letter E type stuff). A major negative for me was some of the openable objects, some of which were completely nonobvious that you could interact with them (the mirror for example), where others like pillows would "open" any time you moused over them (but in other scenes pillows were immobile). There are also quite a few places where you are searching for an item that has several matches ("plant" when in a garden setting!), but only one is correct, which isn't great.

In terms of specific scenes the two screen pannable scene outside the church was an interesting idea, but I found it annoying once most of the items were found as you couldn't even be sure what you were searching for was on screen. Also it and the scene before had an annoying "wind" effect constantly obscuring the view. The UV filter bit was also an interesting variation, although all the animals looked about the same to me.

Finally we have the bonus items - this seemed a bit tacked on and very variable in difficult (marbles, coins, mice were easy, whereas knives, snails and darts were very difficult to find the last few, etc.

Overall then an okay HOG with a few flaws, with nothing exceptional about it good or bad. There are plenty of better options out there in the genre, but it is playable enough especially if you are paying less than a pound for it.

This game is short probably because this is chapter one. You can see my record time and that is the time I used to clear game including credits and extra scenes. It is still a good hidden object and puzzle game. The story is very easy to guess what will happen next for me. I think this game is worth my money because I got it from bundle long ago.

I like HOGs and don't mind if game is just one item find scene after other but this one have really bad graphics. Items was small and very hard to see and it was even more difficult when scene was not well lighted and I just have to click in random to hope and find something. Story would have interest me but it was left unfinished and looks like there will never be more to it so that is dissapointing.

I have played this game once again in a while, and I have to say, it didn't get any better with the time that is left between those two times I started this game.

It is one of those HOGs that gave the whole genre a bad reception. And sometimes this bad reception is well earned. The story is cheesy, to say it in the most benevolent way. The HOGs itself are, well not at a contemporary standard, even at the time the game was originally developed. The sound, well another matter that is giving some pain.

Of course, there are games that are worse, but this never is a valid argument for creating and distributing half baked ideas. Furthermore this game can really bore the ... out of you. It is just as entertaining as sitting in a dentists chair with fading anesthesia and expecting the extraction of a tooth. You have to be a masochist to actually enjoy the game.

I won't and can't recomend this game.