A Dense and Varied Hidden Object Game That’s Creaky with Bugs
Faircroft Antiques and its intrepid historian, Mia Faircroft, return in The Forbidden Crypt. It’s a title that might make you wonder if the hidden object series has deviated into horror territory. But we can put that to bed pretty quickly. This is about as horrific as watching a Sex and the City marathon. Now we think about it, that might be horrific for some.
Faircroft Antiques: The Forbidden Crypt Collector’s Edition is a light and fluffy confection that fans of Ocean Media’s hidden object games will immediately appreciate. It tells the story of Mia and her Austrian friend Maria (the similar names really bugged me), as they head to Porto Nacosti in Italy to do a spot of art restoration for Father Sebastian, the newly installed priest of the rustic town.
Second Time in Rome: Collector’s Edition
Having recently played First Time in Rome: Collector’s Edition from the same devs and publisher, I will admit to being a little worried. Mia is the spit of that game’s Nicole, and I didn’t fancy doing the same ‘tourists finding love in Italy’ routine again. They immediately echoed each other.
I needn’t have worried. While there are some similarities between the games (Maria finds herself a nice Italian man and makes excuses to visit him), Faircroft Antiques: The Forbidden Crypt is shrewd enough to try something different. The romance plotline is tongue in cheek, with Mia taking the mickey out of Maria’s cavorting. Plus the main plotline goes to places that are more unexpected.
Father Sebastian has been receiving an endless supply of artwork and antiques from the local entrepreneur, Gabriel Monsini. The Monsinis are a long line of wealthy merchants, and Gabriel seems determined to offload the family’s heirlooms to the church, even when they display pagan or polytheistic imagery. Father Sebastian enlists Mia to find out why, and the answer looks like it might reside in the crypts below the church.
A Surprisingly Cryptic Storyline
As a plotline goes, that’s pretty unusual – to me at least. It’s a mystery that I was genuinely curious to resolve, and my guesses were wrong. I didn’t expect to find something so nuanced in an Ocean Media hidden object game.
The hidden object puzzling is equally sophisticated. The story is an excuse to hop to different locales – vineyards, antique stores, luthiers – and talk to the different characters there. After talking, there is an excuse to go searching for an object, often because the character has lost something. More so than most hidden object games, I felt like I was a) in a place and b) searching for something with good reason. Faircroft Antiques: The Forbidden Crypt is adept at embedding the gameplay in the narrative.
It’s also very good at coming up with different ways to search for stuff. The traditional shopping list of items is mixed up with some point-and-click interaction. You can use keys on locks and then zoom into purses: that sort of thing. On repeat visits, those point-and-click locations remain open. You have to remember which locations can be zoomed into for further hide-and-seeking.
Faircroft Antiques: The Forbidden Crypt doesn’t stop at shopping lists, however. Sometimes you are looking for silhouettes or a visual representation of the item. At other times you are given a single sentence description, which is hit-and-miss on whether it’s particularly useful (we were asked to look for something that ‘could be wood or metal’, and – honestly – half the things in the room could have fit that description). Our favourites were puzzles where a single category of thing was hidden. Finding 15 cats in a market stall is more quickfire.
A Jigsaw of Different Game Modes
There are minigames, but instead of opting for a variety of puzzles, they are almost all either spot-the-differences or jigsaw puzzles. If that makes you groan a little then save your criticism for a moment: Faircroft Antiques: The Forbidden Crypt keeps them small, and they’re never traditional jigsaws. They’re not quite as janky as jigsaws tend to be in this kind of game.
With all these compliments about Faircroft Antiques: The Forbidden Crypt, you might be wondering why the score at the end of the review isn’t higher. Unfortunately, Faircroft Antiques: The Forbidden Crypt is half-finished to the point that we struck a half mark off the score. In the port from PC to console, something has been damaged.
Regularly, the game would hang in the menus, to the point that we had to restart the game or skip back to the root menu. Menu items are often prioritised over text, meaning that you can’t read some of the dialogue interactions. And for the second half of the game, punctuation just stopped showing. It’s not a huge bother – you can still read the intention – but it’s not exactly professional.
The hidden object stuff isn’t as sketchy, but it still has problems. We were asked to find one cat or one bat when there were plenty in the scene. Only one bat or cat will be the ‘correct’ answer, which breaks a kind of unwritten rule for hidden object games. Some images are blurry, and some items are squirrelled away in the dark recesses of the image, almost impossible to see. It leaves an abiding sense that something could go wrong at any minute – that the thing you’re hunting for might be hidden in an ungentlemanly fashion.
All of these problems can be vaulted over, not least because there is an extremely generous hint system. You just have to wait a few seconds and it will refresh, pointing directly at the item you need. You won’t get stuck.
Forgiving Hidden-Object Fans Will Find a lot to Love
There’s certainly a lot of game in Faircroft Antiques: The Forbidden Crypt. Even without the addition of the ‘Collector’s Edition’ stuff (an extra five chapters on top of the fifteen of the main story), this would have been a substantial game. You will be playing it for longer than the old Artifex Mundi games, for example, thanks to some reuse of levels (but never too much reuse) and a free play mode that lets you choose the category of hidden object experience.
I dallied with adding a half-mark to Faircroft Antiques: The Forbidden Crypt’s score, but in the end there were too many fuzzy edges to the art and rough edges to the game menus. Like an old wardrobe, Faircroft Antiques: The Forbidden Crypt is voluminous, deep and with an interesting story behind it. You just have to ignore where it’s falling apart.
Important Links
Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/faircrofts-antiques-the-forbidden-crypt-collectors-edition/9nhnrtrv09vp
