Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

First off: yes, the download for this game takes a pretty long time. It IS a large game, and is very graphics-intensive, so if you're planning on playing this on your Fire, you're probably not going to be able to play any other games or watch movies in the meantime. The graphics are amazing, the premise is intriguing, the music is perfectly creepy, and the puzzles are challenging. So why only two stars? (Beware, here there be spoilers.) 1.) A hefty portion of the game is spent looking for what I started thinking of as "plot coupons." You have to find 13 little snake thingies and 3 keys for one door and two halves of a couple of other keys and 5 fuses, etc. etc. A LOT of time is spent running back and forth from one location to the next looking for the next "coupon." After a few hours of this, I was hitting the "hint' button constantly just to keep moving. 2.) I can't imagine trying to play this game without the "hint" button. I love puzzle games and hidden object games, and for me it's usually a point of pride not to need hints, but in this case certain objects or puzzles were darn near impossible without a little help from the game. I don't think it's because the game is especially hard. It just doesn't give you a lot of information to work with. During the underwater section, you're sent off for additional parts two or three times. Nothing in the game narration tells you what you need. It just keeps telling you that [whatever] won't work until you have the right parts. After a certain amount of searching nearby, I just started hitting "hint." It sent me across the island, referred me to a spot where there were no obvious action items, showed me what I needed, and then told me I needed something ELSE to retrieve that object. If this kind of thing happened once or twice it would be challenging, but instead it was basically the whole game. 3.) There were a few inventory fakeouts (something that I really hate in games). I had to pick up a few objects, watch a few irrelevant cutscenes, and then carry these objects around for the rest of the game for no reason. Maybe I'm being nitpicky, but in most adventure-type games it's implied that if you pick something up, it will eventually be of use. 4.) Some of the puzzles were repeats of other Alawar games (or those games are repeats of this one. Don't know, don't care). I had just played Snark Busters a week earlier, and a few of the puzzles are friggin' identical. Come on, guys, you can do better than that! 5.) The game starts out with a facinating storyline - our hero has just been stranded on a mysterious island, his girlfriend was kidnapped, and there are some very strange footprints and weird snake sculptures everywhere. There's a cuise ship that's run aground, and it looks like something tore its way out of the hull from the inside. Elsewhere, we see old newspapers discussing the mysterious disappearances of a number of people over the last 90 years. A church has been demolished, and we find the remains of a woman bricked into her bedroom. Her journal tells us that she was pregnant, and that her husband was one of the missing. Interesting, right? Too bad none of it matters in the end. I would say that the ending is a twist, but really, it's just incredibly random and raises more questions. In conclusion: this game is like LOST, but if LOST had been canceled after season 2. Nothing is answered, and I felt like I had wasted my time by playing.