Review – Grim Tales: The Bride

Introduction

Most of us must have read or at least heard about the tales of these brothers. Some shabby books of Grim’s may still are sitting in your bookcase read many times by your ancestors long before even you were born. It makes a great honor for Elephant Games developers to take one of their tales as an inspiration in creating of their game. The name itself – Grim Tales: The Bride catches eyes of anyone refreshing for a moment sweet old memories of listening to or reading the tales of Grim’s. Let’s see how well genre of hidden object game fits into this story.

So, here is the story- a remarkable day in the whole life of your sister, a wedding day was turned into tears. Bride, your dearest sister has gone forever leaving behind queastions and mystery of her disappearing. Would you let this to happen if you could know about this before? No! Brotherly love is burning your heart and is saying – “go and find who did it at whatever cost!”.

Gameplay

You taking a journey back to memories in abandoned family mansion to find the clues. A creepy guy will meet you at the beginning and trades your soul for guiding through the memories of sister. This travel may turn as the last in your life if you fail, but your are determined.

It looks that the mansion was not inhabited for a while, evidently seen everywhere, like uncleaned house, overgrown bushes, unattended family graveyard.

You can look at diary for records of events happened in the places you visit. As you play and resolve puzzles and find hidden objects you inventory will grow with various tools used to recover memories.

Choices of options are plenty in the game. Levels of difficulty vary within three levels – casual, advanced and hardcore aimed at providing flexibility to create easy game for beginners with prompting sparkles, hints and skipping options and hardship for experienced players removing all of these flavors. Game has plenty number of puzzles and hidden object scenes that are very easy to play. Hint click in the shape of pocket watch is nice, especially when seeing relighting diamonds on the cover. Waiting for hints to refill is wasting of the time, it recovers very slowly. But in easy mode it can show you where are you going next.

While playing you notice that you are walking too much forth and back between distance places of the mansion. It is also wasting of time. Would be good to have a map with quick move to spots.

Graphics

Game has excellent graphics showing in details items in hidden objects and puzzles. The night with full moon and cloudy sky, bright candles in the rooms of the mansion, mist in the graveyard and forest and street lamp luminescent are well colored in variety of tints. Half decayed holy man in the church and creepy man are well drawn and not so much of fear.

Sound

The game has good sound effects and music holding to scenery of the game. Like most of the games no voice overs but would be good to have in some places to explain the need for certain items you find. But there is some conversation with that creepy man but that is not always useful.

Conclusion

Well, Grim tales are good but it doesn’t not guarantee that the game based on them will succeed or at least be good to play. All tales have usually final point when everything becomes clear which is not observed in this game. The game has good hog’s and puzzles not serving for the purpose of the mission. The game ends suddenly leaving player to guess and make conclusions. If the game would have map to jump around then it would last some hours to play even for average player. The game can be kept aside and played some other time.