Two puzzles bugged out on me (the flower clocks and the stone pillars). It's still possible to finish the game, since you can get past the puzzles using the skip button, but the fact that multiple reviewers mentioned this problem and it still hasn't been fixed a year after the game's release on Steam gets this an automatic thumbs down.

Unfortunately the rest of this game wasn't even bad in a bizarre and entertaining way, just generic and instantly forgettable. If not for the bugginess, I doubt I'd remember that I'd played it at all.

A young girl is scared that her parents are splitting up after a nasty argument. She dreamed about a book that can grant wishes. However, the next day, a strange man gave her this item. When she wrote her wish, she finds herself stuck in a nightmarish world, where she has to defeat the Guardian of the Book if she wants to come back to our world...

The Book of Desires is putting you in the shoes of a child, in a nightmare world... However, she's confronted to skeletons, ghosts and anything else that can scare easily a kid, but our protagonist isn't at all scared of where she is. Everything is written as if it was an adult and not a poor girl scared about the future of her family.

The gameplay is the standard one: find objects, use them, clear hidden objects scenes, solve puzzles. Apart the fact that you will speak to people that will help you and the little twist at the end, nothing is really extraordinary. But I must say that everything is polished and well-balanced. There is just one or two bad translations (like compass translated as "boussole", used for finding North, South, East and West, which is a right translation but in the scene, it was the tool to draw a circle, which is "compas" in my language) and a puzzle that seemed to be broken as I couldn't do anything about it apart waiting for the skip button to be active.

The graphics are really fitting to a creepy world: everything is dark, filled with scary entities. I appreciated them, As for the soundtrack, I didn't really pay attention to it.

What really bothered me is that I didn't feel like the child was reacting as a child. If I can take Clementine from The Walking Dead and make a comparison, I would say that Clementine was more reacting like her age, even if she was in a post-apocalyptic world and had to grow up quicker than planned. However, in the game, it's like you were controlling an adult and an adult that doesn't seem to frightened despite the circumstances.

In the end, I would consider The Book of Desires as an average casual game. It's not too bad but it's not as good as other titles out there. If anything, I find the price a little high, it's better to wait for a bundle or for a big discount. As for me, I won it during a giveaway, as it was a bundle leftover from Groupees. I'm giving it a positive review despite being mixed about it.

While The Book of Desires looks astonishing for its time, it is also a prime example on how good graphics alone cannot make an enjoyable video game—even in a casual genre like hidden object games.

Beautiful but shallow: these are probably the two most prominent words I can use to describe The Book of Desires. While it is undeniable that its hand-drawn scenery looks gorgeous for an early 2012 hidden object game, it has almost no positive qualities beyond that.
Well, okay: there are tons of hidden object scenes, especially towards the end; and, for the most part, they are quite decent.

The problem is, there are other parts to this game, not just these scenes, and those parts are terrible: the adventure game mechanics suffer from horrendous item placement and the puzzles are almost insulting.
As for the story, it is supposed to be about a little girl trapped in a magical book that is supposed to fulfil secret desires, but it is an unsalvageable mess that lasts barely an hour and a half, hitting the final nail in this poor game’s coffin.

Like almost all the people who posted negative reviews, I ran into a broken puzzle, in my case the three figurines pedestals. But skipping it still worked, so I was able to finish the game.

Pros:

• The train puzzle rocks. One of the best puzzles in hidden object games I have seen
  
• The hidden object scenes were exactly right, not too hard and not too easy
  
• Excellent hint system. The few times I got stuck, the hint system quickly guided me to the place where I had missed something

Cons:

• Buggy
  
• Low budget feel
  
• Whole world feels kind of cobbled together, sometimes feels artificial and un-lived in, sometimes leaves the player wondering how it is supposed to make sense the way rooms / items are arranged. Suspense of disbelief is taken a bit further than in AAA hidden object games

Thumbs up for a game that was entertaining enough, even with one broken (but skippable) puzzle.

This game reminds me of a Hidden object game that could be played on Pogo(dot)com back in the late 90s-early 2000s.

One of the Free games, not one of the *slightly* better paid games.
Music- not great, just a bit of repetitive "ominous" sounds and notes.
Over all, the art was very dull, drab and muddy.
Hidden object scenes were flat, muddy, and had "find the pixel you need to get that item" going on- clicking the same thing over and over until you find that one pixel is just annoying as....
The story was worse than most, and no hidden object game has ever really had a compelling and deep story. This one was really bad, compared to them all. Yeah, it was lame.
Puzzles were a blend of childish and easy- trial and error or just skip through it.
No penalties for skipping or using hints, other than waiting for the timer to wind down again.
Extremely short and unsatisfying.

I enjoy HOGs and HOPAs- i did not enjoy this one at all.

Get it free or super cheap as part of a bundle- sure. It'll add +1 to your game count. Full price? Not a chance- unless you are truly masochistic and enjoy shelling out good money to make yourself hurt and get abysmally bored.

Skip it. It's not worth it.

Well the flower puzzle is broken so I would give it 0 with potential for improvement if fixed so that it could be played.

I just finished The Book of Desires; apparently, the book's desires only take about 2.5 hours to fulfill 🤣. If I had played this game when it was originally released, my review would have reflected an entirely different attitude. Oddly, I am finding a new love for these "past-their-prime" (if they even had a "prime" moment) junk HOPAs from an era when everyone wanted a piece of the HOPA pie and rushed to design their own cash-crop game from the comfort of their damp, humble basement.  

The Book of Desires is a very old-school game, originally released by Meridian93 in April of 2012. This is the kind of game where you have to read between the lines and fill in the blanks to keep up with the plot, which oftentimes goes from Point A to Point D every time you blink!

The Book of Desires has no Voiceovers, no Collectibles, no Morphing Objects, no Extras, and no frills. The graphics are dark, grainy, and void of intricate detail. There is no Strategy Guide, no Custom settings, and no Jump Map. The Hint system will continue to guide you with arrows until you reach the "desired" task and then takes an eternity to recharge.

BUT... What it does have makes up for what it doesn't have! It does have an abundance of old-school-cool Hidden Object Scenes, one in each scene location. Back in the day, HO scenes didn't have any glamour or glitz, they didn't have interactive tasks, and they didn't have animations, tasks, or puzzle-like features. They were just basic Hidden Object Scenes requiring you to find objects from a list of items, usually from a pile of random junk spewn about in the darkest corner of the room. The objects rarely had anything to do with the story and most of the time they weren't even from the same era as the game's plot. There was always a Feather, a Lock, a Bell, an antique Iron, and a Candle to be found in almost every game!

STILL... developers somehow managed to make these HO scenes challenging.  
Just when you become convinced that a listed object couldn't possibly be in the scene you just scoured intently over multiple times, you get that duh moment when you find it hidden in plain sight. It's because back in the day, developers blended objects into the scenery using some sort of Unicorn coding magic, and quite possibly a smidge of voodoo dust.

Surprisingly, The Book of Desires has some pretty decent mini-games, and several of the games require you to memorize codes or the position in which to place specific objects correctly. One of the games in particular was quite impressive and I'm baffled as to why this mini-game has not been offered in other HOPA games! This was a game where the goal was to guide a locomotive to the exit by selecting arrows at each intersection but they threw in several intersections that would change the train's course when it crossed over a curved arc arrow. The game was maddening at times, and quite challenging to solve!

I did have an issue with one mini-game towards the end of the game where you had to place several stone heads onto stone pillars. After placing them, the heads went MIA and disappeared completely into thin air, poof! Every time I clicked on a pillar, I just got a message telling me to swap the heads to align the pillars but there were no heads to swap. I couldn't do anything so I had no choice but to skip the puzzle.

If you've grown weary of playing newer, cookie-cutter HOPAs that hold your hand every step of the way...if you find yourself replaying older HOPA favorites because the newer games just don't have the same magic...give The Book of Desires a try. It won't blow you off your computer chair, but it will remind you of how cool old-school used to be!

Oh yeah, apparently they didn't bother with quality control back then either because "Puzzle" was spelled PUZLLE throughout the entire game 😉

MY REVIEWS

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It was a lovely looking fairly short and simple HOG but the problem was that I also experienced a lot of bugs and lags. They didn't really bother me all that much but I know that paying for a broken game is not fun at all, so I don't really recommend this one. Plus it's way too short for the price it's asking. It's about an hour or two of gameplay.

There were some really nice puzzles and the HO scenes stood out more between the two. Although, with the HOS there was a tendency to find the same objects despite having a lot of different scenes.

Pros:
> The HOS were fun this time around
> Some unique puzzles
> The skip button works well at least haha
> Pretty short and casual, there weren't any punishments for skipping or using hints or misclicking

Cons:
> Some puzzles are badly broken---The stone puzzle never worked for me so I had to skip it (it didn't register that I had all statues), with the train puzzle, the train ran right out of the screen (it was hilarious) so I had to completely restart the game for it to work again
> Lots of typos and broken English
> The story was mostly ran through chunks of paragraphs...which is sad because the first 'chapter' was interesting to me

A sub-par HOG that sort of feels like it was cobbled together from a bunch of unrelated scenes left over from other projects. Overall quality is very inconsistent. The story is vague, barely present, and impossible to care about. Puzzle design seems rather lazy and some puzzles are basically repeated. Minigames are poorly explained. Glitches and graphical mishaps are common. Ends with a lame hook for a sequel that I sincerely hope will never come to fruition.
The actual hidden object scenes aren't the worst I've seen, but they aren't worth bothering with the rest of the game. There are plenty of better HOGs out there to play.

A hidden object game of the average type. If you try to do puzzles in a different order than intended it will cause a bug. No achievements or trading cards and not entertaining enough for the full price.