Quick impressions for Mind Snares: Alice's Journey (Has anyone else noticed that virtually every hidden object game needs a colon in it?)
You play entrepreneur Alice Dahl (Holy hell! She has a name AND she's not a detective!) who is basically relaying the secret of her success to an interviewer. It starts with her fretting over her current job to her husband, Jack, who encourages her to quit and follow her dream of opening a bookstore/cafe. One car accident later, she goes through a journey inside her own mind where she has to face various internal obstacles. I'll give credit where it's due: for a hidden object game it's pretty creative and original. It's a bit heavy-handed in places, but then again video games in general are not known for their subtlety. There was only one disappointing part where the antagonist tells her she will lose someone important to her, and I'm thinking "Oh crap, are they setting up some kind of third-act tragedy, like her husband dies or divorces her, or her CHILD dies or something?! Shit is about to get REAL!" ...Turns out it was much less interesting. Also, did she really tell the interviewer all that? "And then I fastened a pair of pruning shears with a screw in order to cut these roses."
The gameplay was decent. No bullshit to be had, except for a few tropes that are showing up - all these female protagonists require a glove at some point because they don't want to touch something with their bare hands. It's just a moldy blanket, woman, suck it up! Anyway, the minigames are still getting repetitive as I play more of these games, but it's hard to fault one individual game for that, and the hidden object scenes were fair and decently challenging. The way it's set up is somewhat linear, with four sets of areas to go through (similar to House of 1000 Doors) which means some of its inventory puzzles are some "okay this goes here, I get new item which goes here, next item collected and goes here" with not much thought into it. Once again, this could only be because I'm an old hand at them.
The voice acting is pretty good in this (I guess Kristin Price wasn't available) and the graphics are better than average.
The length is just shy of three hours, and JUST as I write that sentence, the idling for the third card has ended at 3.3 hours. It's a little below average, but it felt longer because the story carried it along well.
All in all, despite being a bit short, there are no major problems with this one. So if you run across it again, don't just idle it for cards, play it! (...and THEN idle it for cards!)
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