Ashley awakes to a recurring dream about an old house burning out on the edge of town. As she prepares for the day, a letter arrives with her name and the wrong address. It contains a map of the house and an old iron key. Ashley doesn’t fear ghosts she tells herself, she fears what’s inside of her.
“Age of Enigma: The Secret of the 6th Ghost†is the latest mystery puzzle adventure from Casual Box with music and sound design by the Cleophas Brothers. They highly recommend by the way, the Cleophas Brothers do, that you play this game with headphones on. They want you to really take in the soundscape they have engineered for your gaming pleasure, and it shows. The voiceovers are lively and the music stirring, you can feel the creative effort that went into it.
It’s not recommended taking the Brothers’ advice until you have carefully adjusted your sound settings. In the special edition, the default audio levels are too high and the options menu doesn’t work at all. You cannot change the volume or put the game into windowed mode either, so you’ll have to make your adjustments in your OS before running the game.
When you first enter the house, a creepy looking guy with a friendly voice, Nathan, appears in the hallway. He offers to help you with your quest. He gives you an amulet adorned with a pentagram and five empty slots — where it looks as if gems belong. The amulet then becomes part of your heads up display, instead of your inventory as a normal item would. There are five points, of course and five empty slots corresponding to the first five ghosts you will encounter.
Rather than having levels and bosses, game progression breaks down by rooms of the house. There are a few extra rooms, a closet and a kitchen, where you will find objects to collect. But for the most part, each ghost resides in their own room. You will meet the ghost straight away when you first enter a new room. They will ask you to solve several puzzles to test your worth. Once you’ve gained their trust, there will be a cut scene showing your taking their hand, thereby entering the supernatural realm where you can untangle the source of their unrest.
As is usual to the genre, the game world consists of still screens rather than movement. Each area has several screens, though usually not more than five. Fresh screens contain a number of small objects to be found and collected for puzzle solving and progression.
The image style has a classic CG feel, with photographic backgrounds, clean simple lines, finely articulated blocks of color and simple animations, if any.
The puzzles of course are the main attraction of the genre and Casual Box has done good work. There are math puzzles, image puzzles, and even a musical puzzle. Two of the best examples are one where you are shown a stack of cubes and have to figure out how to count them, and another where you have to place images that belong on the six faces of a cube. Both require arithmetic, and abstract special recognition.
There is a good mix of styles and difficulty. This game will keep you entertained for a week or two if you play it for a few minutes at a time, as you should. To be clear, this title is not for power gaming; go back to CoD, or the new Star Wars MMO, if that’s what you’re into.
During the first ghost quest there is a puzzle where you have to match image fragments to two larger murals. Each time you load the puzzle the image fragments are randomly generated. It’s a clever design and makes for a fresh challenge each time you go through it. However, there are some parts of the murals that are blank and featureless, and the generator is not designed to avoid them, so you will sometimes find the task impossible and have to reload it.
By ESRB standards the game would be rated T for teen, meaning 13-and-up. The App Store however is not ESRB Rated; there it is rated for 12-and-up. Indeed there are several scenes that are very graphic. A bloody human sacrifice for instance and later, images of skeletons and tormented ghosts. It all makes sense though since your 9-year-old probably wouldn’t enjoy the complexity of some of the puzzles.
How the restless spirits of a Mesoamerican priest, an Oriental maiden, a red-bearded pirate, an Egyptian pharaoh, and European-looking monk all ended up haunting the same house in suburban America, is never explained. But who cares? Games like this are played for the enjoyment of giving your brain an exciting diversion during your lunch break, or keeping the kids busy while you spend some quality time with the spouse.
The game is well designed and well produced, and with only a few glitches. And since it’s sold through the App Store, not on disk, those may soon be patched out.
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