Travel to the Land of the Dead and face the gods of Ancient Egypt in Eternal Night: Realm of Souls, the enthralling hidden puzzle adventure game. Find your way into a supernatural kingdom crumbling under the weight of a titanic battle between the gods. Use your puzzle-solving skills to unlock powerful spells and discover ancient secrets. Explore this mysterious realm and find a way to resolve the conflict and restore light to the mortal kingdom of Ancient Egypt!
Eternal Night: Realm of Souls is an epic adventure game set in a fictional Ancient Egypt. At the beginning of the game, the land has been drowning in darkness for seven days and the sun is nowhere to be seen. Worried, the pharaoh asks for a volunteer to travel to the Land of the Dead and gain an audience with the gods. Hopefully they would be able to find out what's happening and bring the sun back to the mortal world. You are that volunteer, and the game chronicles your adventures in this mystical realm.
The game is a hidden object puzzle adventure game with an Egyptian theme. You will meet Egyptian gods such as Hathor, Anubis and Khnum, and will explore wondrous magical worlds ranging from a crumbling volcanic cave to the workshop where Khnum transforms clay into human babies. You will also meet various other characters such as lost souls who will trade their valuable secrets for shiny trinkets.
The first thing that will grab you is how gorgeous the art is. The art style is similar to cel animation, and is full of vibrant and rich colors that bring each supernatural realm to life. The detail and the way the art changes to fit each realm are breathtaking. However, this beauty comes at a cost: the high quality art means that loading times between scenes can be a bit slow depending on how powerful your system is.
As for the gameplay, Eternal Night is like the standard hidden object adventure format, where you explore the world by moving from scene to scene. You will face obstacles which you need to overcome by solving puzzles and hidden object scenes. You will also pick up objects along the way that you can use to solve these puzzles.
However, Eternal Night is different due to its style and higher difficulty level. The quests or goals in the game are organized into major storyline goals divided into smaller hidden goals that you need to solve in chronological order. For example, the overall goal of creating a magic flute will include steps such as obtaining clay, molding it into a flute, then finding a potion to turn it into stone. But you won't know what these steps are until you get your 'aha!' moment and figure it out. In addition, the hint button won't tell you what next to click. It will just give you a picture that hints as to what the next hidden step involves.
The hidden object scenes and puzzles are also generally of a higher difficulty level (though some puzzles can be skipped if you are having trouble with them). The hidden object scenes aren't your standard games with a laundry list of items you need to find. Instead, one of the hidden object games will give you a scene full of objects, and an Egyptian papyrus painting above it. The painting will be missing a few items, and you will need to find those items in the hidden object scene and place them on the right spot in the painting. Another type of hidden object scene has a 3D feel to it. It features items displayed on the surface of a vase, and you need to rotate the vase to find them all.
The puzzles are just as difficult, and feature games that are unique and have an Egyptian feel to them. An example is the maze puzzle where you need to move your little Egyptian figure from a starting tile to a goal tile. However, there are obstacles along the way, such as the lion, ocean and the fire tiles. You will need to visit a sword tile in order to defeat a lion tile, and a boat tile which allows you to cross an ocean tile etc. To make matters more interesting, you can't backtrack in this puzzle, as each tile can only be visited once. Lots of fun!
Eternal Night is admittedly more difficult than the standard hidden object game, but that can be a plus for players wishing to exercise their brain a bit more. The gorgeous art and the epic feel of confronting ancient Egyptian gods are another plus. You will like Eternal Night: Realm of Souls if you like adventure games with unique and mind-boggling puzzles such as Drawn: Dark Flight.
Rating: 4.0/5.0
You can read more about Eternal Night: Realm of Souls and try the game at
http://www.hidden-puzzles.com/eternal-night-realm-of-souls.html