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7.4 excellent
Today's word is Iblardesque. Iblardesque means "in the style or manner of Iblard," referring to the surreal fantasy realm featured in the paintings of Japanese artist Naohisa Inoue. (This realm is portrayed briefly in one of my favorite films, Mimi wo Sumaseba.) Not many people use the word Iblardesque outside of fancy pants art books and in fact I believe I'm the first to use it on the internet. Yay me.
Elementals: The Magic Key is a new hidden object adventure game from Lucky Soft. It can be described as just a tad Iblardesque, due to the floating sky islands that make up the fantasy world of Eiron in which the game is set. You play the character of Albert, a young neophyte magician in training at the Academy, a school for conjurers, magicians, sorcerers, and wizards. As two of the few students at the school, you and your much more intelligent sister Lillian have free reign of the campus... until a disgraced former student (seeking revenge, as disgraced former students always do) returns and kidnaps your sister! Not only that, but the big-eared, green-stripe-in-his-hair bully breaks the Great Key of Eiron into its six base elemental pieces! I needn't point out that such a fracture can only spell trouble for the delicate balance of elements in the world! It's up to you as Albert - and your (also much more intelligent) familiar and sidekick Felly - to recover the fragments and save Lillian.
If anyone knows what kind of animal Felly is, please let me know. He looks like a cross between several muppets, and he flies and wears a monocle, so I'm at a loss.
Elementals contains many aspects of hidden object games, but the primary focus is on gathering items and using them to solve puzzles, fix broken machinery, reveal clues, unlock doors, and so on. Rarely do you come across a room cluttered with all manner of junk and need to search among the clutter for a grocery list of random widgets. Instead, items are hid in the complexity of the scenery. At all times your current task (or tasks) is printed in the upper left corner of the screen. I found these directions invaluable because a few times I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing. The game takes place completely within a fantasy realm, and repairing fantasy gadgets can be quite daunting if the last game you played had you repairing more mundane objects like typewriters.
A running commentary between Albert and Felly and the characters they chance upon in their journey is ever present; there's a lot of text to read and unfortunately no voice overs. Perhaps even more unfortunately, conversations tend to pop up when you're clicking about on the screen, trying to figure out what to do next. Any errant clicks will skip past the current word balloon before you even realized it was there and you probbaly should have read it. A few mistakes like that, and you've fallen behind in the story. Curiously, the separate, cutscene conversations - the ones that don't take place in the foreground of puzzles or hidden object scenes - cannot be skipped.
Puzzles can be skipped, and hints are readily available if you're unable to find an object. Just click on the question mark icon next to Felly. This hint button takes about twenty seconds to recharge between uses.
Like many hidden object adventure games, you have an inventory that fills up with items you can later select to use on objects in the background. Mousing over the scene often reveals objects that can be interacted with, signalled by a change in the mouse pointer. A set of gears means the object can be manipulated somehow, a set of boots means it's an exit, a mouth means it's someone (or something) you can talk to, etc. Many, many miscellaneous and extraneous bits of scenery can be clicked on for a description, a neat effect that I wish many other games would copy!
Occasionally in your quest you will be attacked by monsters that want to stomp you into the ground. In these moments, the game switches to a rather simple strategy game to simulate combat. On a 12x12 isometric grid, you move your own pieces in and out of range of enemy pieces, attacking them. You're able to combine pieces to level them up to more powerful forms. It took a few monster attacks before I was savvy with the rules, which basically amount to each player taking a turn moving a single piece then attacking if possible. Pieces have a limited attack range and to keep the game moving, pyramids sprout from the ground and slowly push each player's pieces toward the opponent. The last player with pieces remaining is the winner.
(Along your journey you can collect magical artifacts to help you in combat.)
Elementals: The Magic Key is a gorgeous-looking game and I found its story and world to be very well thought out, but also unengaging and slow to get into. The game throws so many new fantasy elements at the player at once that it's hard to care about all of them. In fact I didn't even realize that Albert was actually in the Academy building (as opposed to his own home) until the game mentioned that the library we were about to enter was the Academy library. But I did eventually get into the story, to which I can only credit the excellent artwork.
Download Elementals The Magic Key