Adventure Lantern Issue (January 2012)

This months Adventure Lantern issue has just gone live. In this issue, in addition to co-editing, I sadly provided all of the reviews. But don't worry, we do have have more authors lined up for the future.

This time around, there are quite a few interesting articles. Most notably, an adaptation of a personal favourite of mine, Murder in the Abbey; A murder mystery set in a medieval Italian abbey and based on the novel The Name of the Rose. But surly the better adventure game, What Makes You Tick: A Stitch in Time also made it into this issue; And what a fabulous, overlooked, piece of adventure gaming this title most definitely is. I also got around to including the, disappointing, casual adventure Voodoo Chronicles: The First Sign, and to show that casual games are not all bad we have the beautiful The Tiny Bang Story in there as well.

The Tiny Bang Story

The Tiny Bang Story is a hidden object game that takes the genre to a never before seen peak; It shows that hidden object games do not simply appeal to a casual audience and that searching for hidden objects does not have to mean a disconnect from realistic puzzles that fit well within the plot. In The Tiny Bang Story you play on a small world that has recently been devastated by a meteor strike and shattered into many puzzle pieces. You travel the unaffected lands collecting these pieces and restoring your world.

The graphics of Tiny Bang are what should draw most players to the game because they are simply fantastic. These visuals are 2D and are quite fantastical in nature with slight hints of steampunk and come across as very alive which is only helped by the fantastic sound track.

The gameplay is equally well polished and I believe is some of the best the genre has to offer and by far the best I have ever played. Every single puzzle and hidden object you are directed to find makes sense in the plot even when considering the number of objects that you are asked to find. And in addition to the hidden objects you will also be solving many logic puzzles, which are quite well done and I found them quite fun is somewhat ambiguous.

My mini-review of The Tiny Bang Story.

Technical:
Getting it to Run (on a Windows 7 x64):
Runs perfectly fine with default settings.

Windowed Mode:
Fully supported.

Alt+Tab:
Supported, no side effects.