Any guy who is now either married or engaged to be is bound to remember that fateful day, that day when it was time to utter those five little words that could mean the difference between happily ever after and back to the drawing board: Can I marry your daughter? A thousand images ran through my brain as I was contemplating the proper way to ask my future father-in-law for my future wife’s hand in marriage. Would he laugh in my face? Would he set me in front of a bright lamp and give me the third degree? Would he send me away, banished to my apartment, never to see the light of day again? Well, of course, nothing like that happened. Certainly I never imagined that I would be forced to solve an elaborate labyrinth to win the hand of my love. A labyrinth from which one may not even make it out alive! Such is the plot of one of the latest seek-and-find adventure games, The Sultan’s Labyrinth.

There is no mystery to the plot. It’s an age-old story. Arabian boy meets sultan’s daughter. They fall in love and decide to get married. Boy asks sultan for his daughter’s hand in marriage. Sultan casts boy into devious labyrinth with the assumption that there is every chance in the world he will not make it out alive. Classic stuff. As the game progresses, we are treated to flashbacks of the boy with the sultan’s daughter, watching them fall in love, intermixed with bits from the present, as we see the daughter coming to grips with what her father demands of a prospective husband, and the grueling toll that the labyrinth is taking on the boy.

The path through the labyrinth is pre-planned, so maze-solving skills are not required. What is required is a sharp eye for detail and the patience of a saint. You will be faced with a number of distinct game types as you make your way through the labyrinth. The most basic is the standard hidden object game. Find the objects in the scene before time runs out. The game gives you silhouettes to go on, making the hunt a bit easier. Another game type has you locating matching pairs of objects in a scene. There is no list of objects, just a number of pairs that you need to find. Yet another variant is finding a number of specific objects in the scene, whether it is insects or leaves or what-have-you. There are a number of completely different game types, as well. The first gives you descriptions of objects as you mouse over them. You need to use the descriptions to solve the puzzle of the room in order to escape. A simplified example would be to use the lit torch in the room to burn through the ropes holding a door closed. The next type is an inlay puzzle variant, where you have to fill in a puzzle with differently shaped pieces of glass that lie scattered around the edges. Once the puzzle is completed, you are allowed to move on. The final type of game is by far the most frustrating. In it, you are presented with an object, and twelve different silhouettes. It is your job to find the matching silhouette. Luckily, this particular game has no time limit, because later levels will have you staring at silhouettes until you go blind. On one particular level, I had narrowed it down to two silhouettes, but both of these looked identical. I even went so far as to impose one on top of the other, and still was unable to find a single difference. But, obviously, one was right and one was wrong, because I chose the wrong one, and had to start over. And when I say start over, I do mean from scratch, because it shuffles all of the silhouettes each time you choose incorrectly. I did eventually solve the puzzle, but with no hints or anything to go on, I felt that this particular aspect of the game was needlessly frustrating.

One thing that I was pleased to see about The Sultan’s Labyrinth was that the rooms were not needlessly cluttered with random objects, making it somewhat easier to locate objects. This may make it too easier for veteran seek-and-find players, but the other game types will help to offset that advantage. The graphics are well-done, clear and well defined. There is little that is more frustrating than having to squint to make out a fuzzy object. Sound is well done, if not particularly noteworthy, with unobtrusive background music and nice feedback sounds.

Frustrations aside, this is one of the more enjoyable seek-and-find games I have played in a while. While the story isn’t as involved as those of the Mystery Case Files series or the like, it does well to move the game along. As long as you have the patience to get through some of the more difficult sections of the game, I think you will enjoy The Sultan’s Labyrinth as well. Click below and download the demo for yourself.

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(2 votes, average: 4.5 out of 5)

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