Red Crow Mysteries: Legion

It’s not every morning that you wake up and get to know that fate of the entire humanity rests on your shoulders. I’m not sure what you’d do, but Legion from the Red Crow Mysteries did just enough to defeat an ancient evil haunting the universe since the beginning of mankind. Now the question lies whether the game did enough to please its fans. A Croatian development group founded by PC game designers Ivan Bralic and Matija Budimir called Cateia Games has recently been on the focus for many occasions; not so long ago with their adventure puzzle called Red Crow Mysteries Legion. The game takes you to an alternative dimension animated with ghosts and demons with full of puzzles to crack, mysteries to resolve and eventually defeat an ancient evil that threatens to destroy humanity.

You must have guessed already that the plot of the game isn’t anything usual. You aren’t an action figure or a veteran warrior gunning down enemies after enemies, where as you are simply gifted to see things what others can’t. A gift that lets you communicate with the spirits must come with a burden, and it does. You wake up one day and face your worst nightmare because you appear to be the only person spiritually strong enough able to deal with such dilemma. Fear not, as you aren’t the only person who’s been though this nightmare. From the ancient times till now, battles between good and evil have been fought countless times and people with special powers such as yours had always defeated evil. Evil, however, never stops as it is cunning and grows stronger while it turns your surroundings against you. Most importantly, he knows your fear, whereas you know only very few about him. Having said so, you get to know about this evil by your mother’s spirit and the tasks lies ahead to defeat him. She urges you to prepare yourself for the imminent clash.

Thus, the game begins with a journey to defeat this evil. During the game you play through three major sequences and each offers several puzzles to decipher. You don’t get to solve the puzzles straightaway. Before reaching each puzzle you must gather the pieces together; mostly those hidden around your screen. You can move from one screen to another by using your mouse and there’s an inventory where you can store all the pieces you’ve found. Not every object is there for solving puzzles, though; some are used to reach certain objects and others as the piece of a puzzle itself. Sometimes several objects need to be combined to make one. In each scene, not all the objects are necessarily kept hidden. Sometimes you’ll clearly see some objects waiting to be picked up, but it wouldn’t be fun if the game lets you do so, would it? You must wisely combine or crack several riddle pieces to collect objects to reveal the grand enigma. If you play the game in easy or casual mode, you’ll be given hints about the most important objects from each scene. Even so, there will be hidden objects and it’s not very easy to figure out their locations. There’s also a button that tells you the locations where you must check for the objects or puzzles. The button takes time to recharge after it’s been used. So, if you don’t want to waste time and test your brain, don’t get used to it. To really have fun with the game, I highly recommend playing it on the Adventure mode. You don’t get too many hints and puts a challenge to players.

As this is a puzzle game, the puzzles are worth mentioning. There are several kinds of puzzles that can be found here; construction puzzles, stick puzzles, tiling puzzles, jigsaw puzzles, lock puzzles, combination puzzles, musical puzzles, mechanical puzzles and more. You name it, the game has it. I must admit though; some puzzles leading you towards the answer are easier to crack. Some will come asDéjà vu, but I’m not going spoil anything about those. Unbreakable or not, presentation of each and every puzzle is remarkable. I must give tons of credit to the visual design team for such a priceless effort. If there are shortcomings on the voice acting, the visuals have overlapped it. It’s not only the puzzles that have good visuals; each scene in the game is presented with noteworthy atmosphere. Perhaps this is what makes finding objects difficult, because they blend so well in the scene. The scenarios are portrayed with solid sharpness and look very realistic.

The only thing that has let the game down, as I’ve said before, is its voice-acting. With all due respect towards the voice actors, I couldn’t stop having this feeling that they were all amateurs or English isn’t their mother language. The game, however, is also being released in German, and it can be a possibility that the same voice actors were used for both languages. It’s vital for any game to have a good voiceover, even if the game goes lesser on the visual side. Because the sound of the game communicates more with the gamer than its visual. Consider games such as Gemini Rue or Blackwell Deception which don’t have the most pristine graphics, but its voice acting delivers. However, not all the voice-acting were bad. The girl who gave the voice for Legion was decent. More sound effects could’ve made the game a little better as there were only a few. There is background music that mostly suits a horror adventure theme which only just fits in the game. Truth to be told, there were more room for improvements in the sound department.

Other than the sound issue, the game is a little shorter than I expected. I’m not complaining it being short, but the story could’ve been a little stretched to cover few extra hours, especially because how the game suddenly meets its end. A few more puzzles with an added scenario could’ve given it a perfect length. Then again, I’m only asking for more because I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the game and all its puzzles and I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a sequel in the making. With only a few bucks to pay for this fantastic puzzle mix, I think it’s worth a try.

Sarwar Ron, NoobFeed