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Anna's Quest
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Graphics & Sound:
Anna's Quest is a fresh, enjoyable adventure game that puts a light feeling cartoon veneer over the dark and troubling adventures of young girl trying to save her grandpa from a sickness.
Given its colorful, Saturday-morning cartoon look, Anna's Quest looks to be a lighthearted story, but this really is just a veil for a pretty dark tale of witches, magic, evil creatures and a girl and her teddy bear. You know, standard folklore stuff. Anna and the other characters have exaggerated features, especially the heads and eyes that do seem to add a good bit of extra expression. I really have to hand it to the game's graphics and animation team. And while the audio aspects aren't bad, there are a few issues.
The voice acting itself seems to be pretty good, but the dialogue seems choppy at times as some dialogue snippets don't quite flow into the next part of the script as smoothly as you would like. This wasn't a big issue for the overall feel of the game, but it was noticeable enough to be worth mentioning here. Similarly, the game's background music is soft and soothing, which adds a nice tone to the atmosphere, but don't expect anything that will stick with you after turning the game off.
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Gameplay:
Anna's Quest's titular character appears to be a normal girl. A girl raised by her grandpa in a farm in the deepest parts of a large forest who is told never to explore because the woods are filled with evil creatures. You know, normal in every way ... well again, normal for a classic fairytale story setup anyway.
When Anna's grandpa gets sick, our heroine decides to go looking for a cure, and, of course, she immediately gets stalked and kidnapped. The driving force throughout the game is all about Anna getting a cure for her grandpa, but her trip takes her from the nearby witch's tower, to a magical village, to a dungeon and finally against the greatest evil known in the land. As Anna searches for a cure for her grandpa, hints about her family's history start to come out.
The first startling thing Anna learns is that she apparently has the power of telekinesis. She doesn't realize this until her kidnapper unlocks the power within her, and unfortunately for the witch, its this fledgling ability that will let her escape and continue her search for a cure.
While the game uses Anna's telekinesis frequently, there are some things that the little girl refuses to use her power on (especially living people and animals), so while a lot of problems can be solved with her mind, most will have to be solved with yours.
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Difficulty:
Anna's Quest's puzzles come in a pretty wide range of difficulties. For the most part, an experienced adventure gamer should be able to make a lot of headway quickly, but there were several times when I found myself flat-out stumped and unable to see a way around the obstacles in front of me. When I did eventually get through these parts though, I never felt like the answer was something I shouldn't have figured out easier; it was typically simply something I had overlooked.
These various sticking points were typically caused by not simply trying to obtain something I thought I could only look at, or even not giving a particular object a second look. The good news is that the game will show you all of the hotspots on a screen, so if you do have to resort to the try-everything-with-everything approach, you aren't left wondering if there is something on the screen you are overlooking.
That being said, there were a couple of times that I had to hunt around the Internet for advice. I'm ashamed to admit it, but it's true. One case in particular involved a solution that wasn't in the style seen before in the game. Where most puzzles are solved by using the right item with another item (either in your inventory or in the world), this particular trouble spot was actually a dialogue-based puzzle that required using the dialogue choices in the right order.
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Game Mechanics:
Anna's Quest follows your standard point-and-click adventure setup. The only real twist the game supplies to this is Anna's telekinesis, but if you simply think of this as another standard interaction option (like talk, look or use), then it isn't all that unusual. That being said, I found that I would attempt to rely on this new ability more than my inventory items and as a result, I would often overlook simpler solutions because I was convinced that the telekinesis gimmick should be the answer. That particular hurdle didn't last long though. After a bit, I stopped trying telekinesis and, yup, you guessed it, I would get stumped because I didn't try applying Anna's power to just the right thing.
So, while Anna's Quest has this nifty new item, don't expect it to be the solution to everything, but don't forget about it either. If you find yourself unable to progress, don't just try applying your inventory items to everything you see, try the telekinesis as well, and sometimes, you might even have to apply your new power to the items in your inventory in order to get exactly what you need to solve your problems.
Anna's Quest really is a fun adventure title that is steeped in classic European folklore. It is a fun adventure game that finds an odd balance between dark settings and a lighthearted feel. I highly recommend it to any fan of the genre.
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-J.R. Nip, GameVortex Communications AKA Chris Meyer |
Minimum System Requirements:
Windows XP 32 bit SP3, 2 GHz Dual Core CPU, 2 GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce 205, AMD Radeon HD 3400 Series with 256 MB VRAM, lastest OpenGL Driver |
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Test System:
Windows 8.1 64-bit, Intel i7-4770K 3.5GHz, 8 GB RAM, Radeon HD 5870 Graphics Card, DirectX 11 |
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Related Links:
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