Alchemy Mysteries: Prague Legends HD has pretty good graphics. You’ll play as Eva, a teenaged orphan who travels to Prague after learning that a mysterious uncle has passed away and left her an inheritance. You’ll travel throughout your uncle’s home and the streets of Prague which take you to an antique shop, a local café and the cemetery. It seems like the area is wide open when you exit the house, but there are really only a very few places you’ll actually visit.

Creepy tension is built continuously as you are visited by these bluish apparitions on a constant basis. It seems the ghosts are trying to warn you about something evil, but what? You’ll encounter Anna, your uncle’s brusque assistant, Mr. Novak, the local antique dealer, his grandson Adam, and a few others along the way. It seems your uncle had a daughter, Sarah, who looked very much like you and the more you explore the house and surrounding town, the more disturbing information you discover.

The lead character, Eva, sounds pretty good. She combines the perfect amount of wide-eyed wonder with a healthy dose of apprehension. I’m afraid I can’t say the same for some of the other characters. Anna sounds ok, a little more Russian than Prague, but Mr. Novak sounds like he is straight out of New Jersey. Some of the dialogue can also be a bit cheesy at times.

The music is dark and foreboding, just like the house you are staying in. You will often hear the plucking of stringed instruments, probably meant to pluck on your nerves at the same time. Sound effects get the job done, but are nothing spectacular.

Alchemy Mysteries: Prague Legends HD will have you exploring your uncle’s house in Prague, digging through cabinets, unlocking locked furniture and unearthing hidden rooms. The game is mostly adventure, with a hearty dose of puzzle-solving and some hidden object screens. There are lots of puzzles to solve, including pure puzzles and environmental ones as well. You may have a memory tile-flipping game, a Tetris-like puzzle, one where you must match colors to clear out rows, a number of them where you need a special magic lamp to reveal hidden symbols which you must then match, sliding tile variants, pictures needing reconstruction, plus a number of puzzles requiring strange symbols to be matched or lines to be drawn to connect things.

The hidden object scenes will often sparkle, indicating you need to delve further into an area. Some items will be greyed out in your list, because they are inaccessible until you do something to reveal them. Blue items will require something further from your inventory before you can obtain them, like a key, for instance. These scenes are pretty basic and will almost always lead to an important item to progress the story. However, more often than not, you simply obtained the item after doing the scene. It wasn’t necessarily always an item that you picked up in the hidden object scene.

Mostly, I felt like I was just wandering around aimlessly trying to figure out what to do next. I’d have a bunch of items in my inventory and no real idea of when or where to use them. I know I am not an adventure genre expert, but I really felt aimless in this game. Sometimes, the Journal would help a little bit, and there is a Task button that will tell you the next thing to do, but a lot of times, I resorted to using the Hint button.

Alchemy Mysteries: Prague Legends HD was difficult for me, mostly because I didn’t really know what to do next. I never felt like I was on a journey, per se. Just moving from room to room, doing things that might shed some light on my predicament, or maybe not. Sometimes, a door or area would sparkle indicating I needed to visit that location, but it wasn’t particularly the next thing I needed to do. Then once I followed the sparkles and visited the room, if I didn’t know what to do and clicked on the Hint button, it would send me back out of the room and somewhere else. This just seemed like unnecessary confusion to me.

Some of the puzzles were unique and fun, while others were just difficult. There were some where I knew what needed to be done, but just didn’t have the patience or desire to see it through. The Skip button came in pretty handy in these situations. Sadly, I played the game on Casual Mode, which should have made things pretty easy, but for whatever reason, I didn’t find it so. Advanced Mode contains more objects in the hidden object scenes, no tutorial, a slow Hint recharge and slower Skip button.

Alchemy Mysteries: Prague Legends HD used both typical and unusual adventure/ hidden object mechanics. Sure, you would tap things to pick them up, but you also had to construct a magic lamp from pieces and parts you would gather up. Then at certain times, you would have to hold the magic lamp up to areas to reveal weird symbols on the wall. You would then have to tap to match these symbols with other like symbols in the vicinity. This is all well and good in some instances, but specifically in the area around the cemetery, I grew quite frustrated. There was no way to hold the lamp up with one finger and tap symbols to reveal with another finger. Why not? So each time, I’d have to go back to my inventory and select the lamp, holding it up to my surroundings and click on a symbol, only to have to re-select the lamp moments later. I must admit this was really annoying.

There’s a rather involved map with exclamation points in green, red and yellow indicating where to go and what to do, but it was much less intuitive to the maps I have seen in the past, so I didn’t visit it too often. You can also click the Navigation button to know which directions you can go from your current point, but you can also just click Hint and cut to the chase.

Sadly, I really didn’t enjoy Alchemy Mysteries: Prague Legends HD at all. The story is dark and interesting, but it was just not fun progressing through the story. Hardcore adventure gamers may feel differently, but I would try it out for free before buying to make sure you will enjoy it.