Sister's Secrecy: Arcanum Bloodlines has you taking control of Ariel. When you were a kid, you and your twin sister were dropped off at an orphanage with no memories of your family or where you came from. When Ariel learns that her sister has disappeared, she follows the clues to a strange land filled with magic and creatures.
The game's story isn't that bad, and while it might sound a little cliche, it offers enough substance to keep the game going and successfully tie together the collection of hidden object screens and puzzles that are apparently rampant in this strange land.
While there are ways to adjust your gameplay experience (more on that later), Arcanum Bloodlines is fairly evenly-balanced between hidden object screens and adventure-style puzzles; the latter being a fair blend of inventory-based puzzles and mini-games or logic puzzles that most adventure gamers will have seen in more than one game before. Quite frankly, as far as the logic puzzles are concerned, most of them don't take too much effort to get through, and even those that are better twists on older puzzles don't require too much effort. But, like the customizable experience, the overall difficulty of Sister's Secrecy is for later in this review.
As for the hidden object portion of the game, Sister's Secrecy keeps the items you are looking for reasonable and besides the occasional word or shape etched on a wall, everything is appropriately scaled and, quite frankly, in plain sight. It just might be in plain sight right in the middle of a bunch of other objects that are in plain sight. I always prefer this over the hidden object screens that might hide a writing pen in the bark of a tree, or worse yet, that writing pen is the height of the tree made up of the lines of the bark. I feel like those versions of hidden object screens are more frustrating than they are worth.
