Enjoyable, relaxing escape game. I needed some time away from intense games and this fit the bill.

This was a solid HOG, the voice-acting was pretty good, characters were great, and the story was fun. Hidden object scenes and puzzles were pretty easy to figure out and a little different which was refreshing. Bonus content was good with a bonus story, good wallpapers, and other unlockable bits. This game was a good intro to the Surface series. The Wishmaster was a pretty cool dude and I loved putting armor on the dog!

A short version for those of you who are just interested in the mechanics:
It's a decent HoG, with all the usual elements. The map is good, I thought. Even though not as pretty as some it's quite a neat representation; much more like a real world map. It doesn't display collectables though, which is kind of a shame, because these are back in force (after being woefully undernourished in Game of Gods). Not much else to say here really; If you like the genre then you'll probably like this one too.

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WARNING: The rest of the review contains spoilers about general story and themes. Apologies for this, but I really don't see how I can even attempt to critically review this game without including this information.

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The game starts with a standard horror plot. This is done well, and the atmosphere generated at the start is genuinely quite creepy. (With one or two exceptions; some of the dialog seems way off mark.)

There's a nice little gimmick that the protagonist is a top-notch archer. This is used throughout the game to add some credibility to a handful of puzzles which really wouldn't work without this little bit of set up.

And then, just as it's starting to get interesting the plot kind of disintegrates into something less of a 'plot' and more of a 'trip' (in the drug sense). Any semblance of keeping the environments and their 'logic' grounded in the real world simply evaporates. And I completely get that; it's a 'dream world'. It's Alice in Wonderland. It's supposed to be imagination run wild. And that too is done very well.

But what I don't get is the protagonist's reactions. Suddenly that fact that all these bonkers things are going on are just taken in her stride. As if using a talking penguin as a battering ram to open a castle made of peanut butter is a completely normal thing for a young girl to be doing on her 16th birthday. (This doesn't actually happen, but I didn't want to include any specific events from the game.) Especially when we finally get back to the real world, and the 'bonkers' just carries right on happening.

In some ways, her reaction (or lack of) was far more surreal and unnerving to me than the environments and events taking place in them. And maybe that's the point. In which case, that particular point missed me by several parsecs. Any sense of immersion or atmosphere just plummeted to zero.

I still played it through and did all the usual HoG type things. And it was still fun. But imagine reading a novel which starts off Carrie and half way through morphs into the Beano. I'm not sure that really works as a concept.

So; a decent HoG, but it would have been so much more enjoyable if it had stayed in 'Carrie' mode all the way through.

Great graphics and music.
Story line made sense.
Fun game.