Myths Of Orion: Light from the North HD was the second to last hidden object game released by G5 in 2015, and it has been a pretty decent way for me to end out the year. It hasn’t been my favorite title I’ve played over the past 12 months, but it has certainly been entertaining working my way through the different lands in the game. The story is interesting enough, though pretty standard for a fantasy game, and there are plenty of locations to explore and puzzles to solve. I do wish the game would have been balanced more towards object puzzles than hidden object scenes or mini-games, but overall it wasn’t too skewed. While G5 has stronger options in their collection, you could certainly do a lot worse than Myths Of Orion as well.
You play the daughter of a sorceress that risked her life to steal some really powerful books from a mad wizard. Now your mother is dead, your aunt’s house is on fire, and some weird cloaked beings have taken the three books from your possession. Of course it’s up to you to get them back, as you can only assume the three goons are minions of the dastardly wizard. In some way, shape or form you’ve probably seen this plot played out in a movie or TV show, but the developers still manage to make it pretty interesting. Aside from your home area you’ll visit three different realms, and given the Orc, Human and Elf ancestries of the locations you might start to have flashbacks of Lord Of The Rings or Warcraft. It’s all pretty familiar to the fantasy lover, but also a good reminder of why people like the fantasy genre.
As you might expect from the hidden object genre there are three basic types of game play: solving object based puzzles, searching for items in cluttered scenes of objects, and solving puzzle oriented mini-games. The object based puzzles are subdivided into tasks that require one object to complete and tasks that require multiple objects to finish. The latter take advantage of the nifty interface where you tap an item and a circle appears surrounded by silhouettes of all the objects required for that task. Unfortunately it is sometimes difficult to tell what the objects are based solely on the silhouettes, though if you read the diary entries as you collect them the items are usually revealed that way.
The hidden object scenes are basic in the sense that you only have to find objects; there are no mini-games to complete or objects to combine in order to reveal any secret objects. The list of objects encompasses both text descriptions and silhouettes, and will either show multiple objects at once or one object at a time. I’m not a big fan of the “one at a time” option because if you get stuck on a certain object you have no alternatives to search for in the mean time. At least I haven’t had to skip any of these sequences yet, though it’s frustrating that you have to visit several of the scenes multiple times.
The mini-games, on the other hand, have been kind of a nuisance in my opinion. For the most part they are derivatives of what I’ve seen in other games, and not very exciting variations at that. When the games have been a bit different they have been frustrating, and in one instance I had to flat out skip the mini-game after wasting 20 minutes trying to solve it. There was another one that I almost skipped as well, but thankfully I managed to complete it just when I was ready to throw in the towel. It is okay if mini-games are challenging, but to me they should be mostly a diversion and never difficult enough to force the player to bypass them. Thankfully I don’t care about the achievements, but if I did that would be a problem since one of them requires you to complete all of the mini-games without using the skip feature.
This is not a collector’s edition, so there is no sequel or prequel short adventure, nor are there any wallpapers or concept art galleries or anything like that. There was enough game play in the main story that no ancillary adventures are necessary, and personally I don’t care much about all that extra stuff anyway. As mentioned above there are several achievements, but you’ll have to play through the game more than once to get them all, and be prepared to suffer through all of the mini-games in order to earn one of them.
At least the game holds up to G5’s generally high standards when it comes to the aesthetics. The backgrounds are well drawn and nicely detailed, with little bits of animation here and there to keep everything from feeling too stagnant. The characters you meet along the way are well rendered, and at least in the case of the orcs and goblin don’t hold strictly to the stereotypes of those races. The sound effects are decent enough, and while the voices aren’t always what you’d expect given the characters you encounter the actors did a good job brining the various individuals to life. The music is well written, and it does a nice job of staying in the background yet having moments where it catches your ear and sounds quite epic.
Myths of Orion: Light from the North is worth playing if you’re a fan of G5’s catalog in particular or just hidden object games in general. It’s not top tier, but it keeps its distance nicely from the bottom of the barrel. Plenty of game play coupled with fine visuals and audio highlight the game’s strengths, while a less derivative story and better balance between individual game play elements would have pushed this offering closer to the top. While we’re waiting to see what the new year will bring to this genre, Myths of Orion is a pretty decent choice for starting 2016 off.
| App Summary | |||
| Title: | Myths of Orion: Light from the North HD | Developer: | G5 Entertainment |
| Reviewed Ver: | 1.0 | Min OS Req: | iOS 7.0 |
| Price: | Free | App Size: | 536.85MB |
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