Game Review - Adam Wolfe (Complete Edition)

Game Review: Adam Wolfe (Complete Edition) by Mad Head Games
Score: +5/-2

Step into the shoes of Adam Wolfe, detective of the paranormal.
Haunted by the images of his missing sister, Adam is driven to the dark alleys of San Francisco, where the supernatural phenomenon intertwined with the criminal underworld.
Secret societies, unnatural afflictions, and ancient covenants await. Are you ready to face them all?

I got Adam Wolfe (Complete Edition) as part of an Indiegala.com freebies giveaway -- every few days, Indiegala offers a free game for download, no strings attached. Often they look like cheesy productions, but games like Adam Wolfe, Agatha Christie - The ABC Murders, and Shuyan Saga are actually really decent bug-free games that offer a polished experience.

The underlying gameplay of Adam Wolfe is what we have come to expect from "hidden object games": You find hidden objects in a scene, and in between you get some puzzles or minigames. And if you add up all the gameplay, each chapter of Adam Wolfe probably weighs in with less gameplay than many other hidden object games. However, where it distinguishes itself from this crowded genre is how this gameplay is presented and your story experience.

++ Plays like an action movie. Scenes are short and to the point, not a lot of wasted time, pacing is fast and you have this "keep going" feel to continue a compelling story to the end. Possibly for this reason the puzzles are not excessively difficult either, to keep the pace instead of suddenly hitting you with a full stop when you are stuck with a puzzle.

- The pace, style, and ambiance of the final chapter, Zero Hour, is very different from the first three, so if you solely liked the faster paced action movie style of the earlier chapters, this one may be disappointing.

+- The individual early stories are good and generally the stories have exciting plot twists, but how the earlier ones try to tie them together into the broader narrative of looking for his sister feels too forced. At the end of a story you get a clue that ties in to that overarching story, but its appearance feels implausible and too contrived. So you are left with the feeling of an independent episode plus a scene pasted on that really doesn't fit satisfactorily.

+ Hidden object scenes are mostly put in reasonable context. You are not just sifting through a mish-mash getting twenty miscellaneous items only to end up with the one quest object you need. Instead text and narrative give context and rationale for why you are looking for what you are looking for. This integrates it into the story quite smoothly. In contrast, other hidden object games focus so much on the looking-for-object gameplay that it ends up disrupting the narrative when you suddenly stop to do something implausible.

However, you can find items before you actually need them, and that can undermine the effect. And there are more "traditional" find-totally-unrelated-items in the later chapters, though they don't devolve into total nonsense items jammed into the scene.

+ Simple minigames let you experience "combat". Combined with the scene direction, it tries to provide an exciting feel of "real time" action, even though you actually have a lot of time to click what you need to click.

Adam Wolfe is available on IndieGala of course but also on Steam as "Adam Wolfe" plus "Adam Wolfe Season Pass".