Bonfire Stories 3: Manifest Horror [SE] NOT FINISHED!
1Blurb: 'Mariaglorum Company proudly presents Bonfire Stories: Manifest Horror, the suspenseful new tale in the chilling Bonfire Stories series!
Alan’s letter sounded desperate, but Caroline found something far worse than she expected when she came back to town to help him. Now, with Alan missing, a foreboding fog blanketing the city, and past secrets piling up, Caroline must use her wits to stay ahead of the terrible evil lurking inside the fog. If you love Hidden-Object scenes, this is the game for you! You’ll need eagle eyes to search through dozens of stunning scenes to help Caroline find the truth about the monster in the mist and to survive long enough to learn how to stop it in this horrifying, unique new Hidden-Object game!'
Sometimes when you play through a game series, you realise that each game is just a rinse and repeat of the other games that came before it (Domini games I'm looking at you specifically, unless you can find an alternate explanation for your last few series coming out being identical to your previous series just with a new name). So when a game series tries something new to try and keep it fresh, I'm always excited to watch what the developers come up with. This game however...have you ever heard someone say they don't like HOG because they're pretty much a laundry list of items to find, then a little bit of story, then back to the laundry list and some easy puzzles thrown in the break-up the monotony? I myself think that those people probably haven't played a *good* HOG, but even I have played a few of those myself, but they are fewer and far between nowadays. Or so I thought. Until I tried to play Bonfire Stories 3: Manifest Horror. It took all the fun out of the series for me, and keep in mind I played these three games over 1-2 days, so I got to experience them one after the other so it was easy to compare and contrast them, and this game has the cardinal sin of all HOG games!!: IT WAS SO DAMN BORING!! I literally kept my eye on the clock and looked at the undiscovered parts of the map and groaned that I wasn't nearly done yet about 20 minutes or so in. I have a job in admin which had previously required me to redo the outer shell of every file in our records room for 8am-4pm Mon-Fri for *2 weeks* and I found that less boring than 1 hour of this game.
That's why when I got the crowbar glitch that stopped me from continuing and meant I had to either stop or restart this game from the beginning again...I chose to stop. Only an hour it would have taken me to get back to where I was and I genuinely couldn't force myself to try and play through those 'levels' again. So if you want to see the ending, please search for some other brave soul who managed to play this all the way through, they have a far higher tolerance for tedious bordem than I.
What makes it worse is the story isn't actually bad or boring, even if it was clear who the real 'bad guy' was from near the beginning, but the CONSTANT HOS' and the 'puzzles' that was largely (except for like 2?) just the same puzzle *over* and *over* again...Nope. Just nope. I hope the game developers well on their projects in the future, but lean towards the formulae for the first two games more than this one. If it ain't broke, don't call this a fix.