You are running up the side of an ancient Mayan temple, trying to stay away from an ancient dragon god that has been released. On the way, you need to pick up cameras lying around. In order to find the components to an ancient skeleton key, you need to find the tools to help Captain Ahab fix his fishing boat. If this sounds normal to you, then you are a fan of the seek-and-find genre. Hide and Secret 2: Cliffhanger Castle should be right up your alley.

The main characters of the game are Will Scout and Anna Lyze. Whether or not these characters are meant to be clones of Indiana Jones and Lara Croft or not is up for debate, but the stereotypes are definitely there, right down to the hat and skin-tight clothes. Will is the happy-go-lucky one, the one who is more likely to bumble into a situation than to actually think it over first, where as Anna is more likely to step back and take a situation in before acting. (Get it? Anna Lyze? Analyse? Hehe!) It is Will’s bumbling that get our duo into trouble in the first place. While cleaning up an ancient castle in order to make it into a proper museum, Will knocks over an ancient crystal ball, which in turn summons the spirit of the great wizard Merlin. Merlin informs the pair that this castle is no ordinary castle, but the fabled Camelot of Arthurian lore. Merlin sends our intrepid duo on a quest to locate the missing pieces of King Arthur’s armor, and in turn, unlock the secrets of Arthur’s decendents.

This quest sends you gallivanting around the globe, literally, as it branches off into a number of sub-quests that will take you everywhere, from Egypt to China to Texas and beyond. The quests run the gamut, from cleaning up Captain Ahab’s boat, to clearing haunted items from western ranches. Each quest is connected, however tangentially, to your main goal, and must be completed in order to continue. Gameplay consists of standard seek-and-find scenes, with lists of objects to find, scenes where you have to find the difference between two pictures, and particularly frustrating glyph sequences. These require you to match a number of glyphs to areas of a large picture or map. These scenes are so cluttered with red-herring glyphs that it can take an impressive amount of time to clear them. Luckily you have no time limit, and a limited number of hints to help you through. One thing that annoyed me, and continues to annoy me about many seek-and-find games, is that the item names can often describe a couple different items in the scene. Which “feather” do they want? Obviously not the one that I found, because no matter where I click on it, it won’t go away. Luckily, there doesn’t seem to be any real penalty for incorrect clicking, other than Merlin appearing and temporarily scolding you for doing so. An interesting twist on the gameplay is that often after solving the seek-and-find portion of the quest, you are faced with an “action sequence” of sorts, where you have to find a number of objects before, for example, a dragon spirit released from a tomb catches up with you as you run up the steps of a temple. These sequences add variety to the game.

What truly makes this game shine is the over-the-top dialog and the out-of-this-world quests. Will’s constant one-liners and puns are enough to keep any Indiana Jones fan satisfied. The dialog between Anna and Will is witty and moves quickly, much like an action-oriented Gilmore Girls script. The characters that Anna and Will meet on their journeys are varied and interesting, as well. And, of course, Merlin oversees it all, with a booming voice that is good, but you just know would have been perfect for the likes of James Earl Jones. The quests are so outrageous as to be completely believable mixed into the outrageous situations that Will and Anna find themselves involved in.

Cutscene graphics are well done, as are the graphics for the gameplay sections of the game. With the exception of some ambiguity as to which objects to click on, I can’t really complain about the seek-and-find portions of the game. The sound is spot on, with catchy music and, more importantly, excellent voice acting throughout. While the story may not be up to the level of some more established seek-and-find series, it does well on its own, and is definitely a step up from the first game in the series. This is one adventure that I believe you will enjoy. So check out the demo below and join Will and Anna for the adventure of a lifetime!

(4 votes, average: 4 out of 5)

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