Howlville: The Dark Past

A short older style puzzle, but fun to play. HOGs were interactive and clever. Mini puzzles were puzzling and different. You play Rachel whose scientist father has been missing for 15 years. Lovely music and good clean graphics. Definitely buy on sale. No bugs. 7/10

A n older, modest seeming game that was a ton of fun. I really love the obvious attention that went into the superb graphics and a story which moved along and kept one engrossed. Yes, it has HOGS but they are the fun kind with plenty of puzzles and interactive items. PLUS the items are relevant for the most part. Lot of interesting mechanical puzzles and and quests. Recommended.

[h1]Short version: 52%[/h1] Howlville is an acceptably B-grade hidden object game that focuses mostly on item searches— including some aggravating pixel hunting—over its generic puzzles. [h1]Long version:[/h1] Howlville: The Dark Past is a typical low-grade hidden object game created with just enough enthusiasm and care to elevate it above of its mass-produced ilk. Probably the storyline is a great example: it starts in a clichéd abandoned town, where the protagonist is looking for her missing father, yet somehow we end up shooting a giant laser cannon at a Cthulhu wannabe. While this sounds awesome, sadly, there is precious little actual plot between these two cardinal events. At least progression is linear, so the lack of map is not a sore spot while we press forward. The majority of the content is hidden object scenes; they are so abundant that they banish over half of the traditional (and rather unimaginative) puzzles inside of them. They are also a bit too old-school, but ...

This is the first hidden object game I've decided not to finish. It's just not fun. It's a pretty serious pixel hunt to find the random things lying about on the ground that you need to pick up. Translations are awful. Hovering over a tire gave me the clue "The inflated tire." Obviously I needed to find an awl and puncture the tired so that it was no longer inflated. The hidden object scenes are similarly messed up. In one scene, the clue was "candle" and the object was a pyramid. I guess it was a pyramidal candle? The clickable areas in the HOGs are ridiculously small. One object I clicked half a dozen times at various times before finally hitting on the one small area that was "live". And the interactive parts of the HOGs are often inexplicable--and sometimes the interactivity is not even indicated. Since you have to find light bulbs in each scene in order to gain hints, you waste a lot of hints on these sorts of issues. It should be said this studio's other (later) ga...

Howlville: The Dark Past is a hidden object game that comes very close to being a recommendation, but I just can’t. In fact, it’s hard not to because there were some neat parts about it. The fact that you don’t have to play more than once to get all the achievements, the artwork and the music. There wasn’t much music, and it was obvious that it kept playing over and over, but what was there, was good. The artwork was excellent. The hidden object puzzles looked neat and were fun. My biggest problem was that the game bugged for me on the very last puzzle. As in I finished the puzzle, the game should go to a cutscene and finish. It never went to the cutscene. It just sat there. I ended up having to replay the entire game because saves are constantly overwritten. The second thing that bothered me immensely was that one puzzle at the end was infuriatingly difficult for me. True, that’s just me, and maybe I simply didn’t get the logic of it, but the rest of the game was fairl...

nice game

This is a marginal thumbs up. What this game lacks in story, it makes up for in hidden object puzzles, of which there are many. They run from medium to hard difficulty. Pretty much every HOP had at least one item that took me a while to find. There are also a variety of other types of puzzles which run from easy to really irritating. I dislike musical follow the sequence puzzles, so I skipped that one. I found the "shoot the ship" puzzle to be irritating and it felt really out of place among the other types of puzzles. A few complaints: * The game is not consistent about representing areas that you can interact with. There are several places where there should have been a hand icon to indicate an interaction. Because it was missing, I ended up having to randomly click around until I found the unmarked hot spot or used a hint. * Areas that have been completed continue to sparkle, which can make it confusing about whether there's anything left to do in a scene. Also, in the church, ...

This is cool little sci-fi HO game. The puzzles are challenging and so are the HO scenes, but not too much. It is old, so the graphics are sub-par and the resolution is standard. No hint/skip penalties for those 100% achievers.

Frustrating. Things don't light up or change cursor sometimes for no reason, and sometimes things are mislabeled in hidden object scenes. Multiple items of the same name also appear. Some puzzles are frustrating just to make you spend more time on them, and there's no real story. I just can't recommend this one.

I've bought this on a really cheap bundle and taking into account this is a really old game, I really enjoyed it. I played in Normal Mode and there's no help at all (I don't use hints). It's a very basic HOG, almost no cut scenes or voice over, you'll basically be looking for objects. I really enjoyed it though, it was very relaxing. I also enjoyed the minigames, could do all of the except the last one, was pretty hard. I recomend it in a bundle o in a big sale if you are looking for a VERY basic and old game.