Spirit Walkers: Curse of the Cypress Witch
Score: 78% ESRB: 9+ Publisher: G5 Entertainment Developer: Orchid Games Media: Download/1 Players: 1 Genre: Adventure
Graphics & Sound: Spirit Walkers: Curse of the Cypress Witch is an adventure game that plays through a somewhat interesting story and has enough unique puzzles in it to keep the player interested, but for some reason, it seems that something is missing to make it a really fun game. Visually, the locations and characters of Spirit Walkers are pleasing. Many of the game's locations have a lot of detail worked into their backdrops and you will travel everywhere from a park where you adventure begins, to a swampy area in the past, and even a strangely-colored otherworld you jump to on occasion. The game's characters look okay, but they feel very generic and none seem to have any real personality. Of course, the game's static-image cut scenes don't do a lot to add depth to these characters. It is just one of the aspects that seems to bring down the feeling of the game as a whole. Audio is another aspect that doesn't quite lend itself well to the game. The background music feels generic and, while it never gets repetitive or annoying, it never really lends itself well to the location. Meanwhile, what voice acting is in Spirit Walkers feels fairly wooden and stiff; maybe that was another aspect that made the game's characters so generic-feeling.
Gameplay: Spirit Walkers: Curse of the Cypress Witch follows three friends as they travel to a park and read about a ghost that is supposed to haunt the woods in order to help anyone who is in trouble. When one of the three ladies falls in some quicksand and the other two help her out, they hope that the Cypress Witch can help their friend. Unfortunately, when they are able to call upon the ghost, the spirit explains that she needs their help in order to stop a curse that is haunting her in order to actually help their friend. Spirit Walkers follows the standard point-and-click adventure model fairly faithfully. You will use objects found around the locations to solve various puzzles thrown in your path. These could be tasks as simple as lighting a lantern or as complex as building a fire and throwing the right plants into it in order to summon the Cypress Witch. Spirit Walkers also throws in some logic-based puzzles for good measure. Early puzzles include figuring out the right order to tap knots on a tree or solving an Othello-like puzzle board. There are definitely more inventory-based puzzles than the logic ones, so those that tend to prefer that aspect of these games should find that good news.
Difficulty: Spirit Walkers: Curse of the Cypress Witch is, in general, an easy game. For the most part, the game leads the player on a steady track to the end with few hiccups. If you do happen to forget what you are trying to do, the game will frequently remind you of your next goal, and if that isn't good enough, there is a Hint button that will point you in the right direction. All that being said, there were still times when I felt lost and if it wasn't for the Hint button, I wouldn't have realized that I could tap on the screen to go off in a new direction. I've realized recently that this is a fairly new problem that I've been experiencing in more and more adventure games. The reason, I believe, is because there is no actual cursor on touch-screen devices, so there is no moving the mouse around and realizing that there is a section that you didn't previously visit. Other games I've played on the iPad recently have included a button or option to show all of the directions you can leave a particular screen, but Spirit Walkers seems to be missing this nifty feature.
Game Mechanics: Like I said above, Spirit Walkers: Curse of the Cypress Witch fits the standard adventure model fairly well. There is one aspect that only happens a few times that really caught my interest. There were several times when I would use an inventory item, only to find it once again on the screen to be picked up and used again for a different purpose. One good example of this is the fact that you have to fashion a way to drag your injured friend after she is pulled out of the quicksand. You use some wires in this stretcher, and once you have her safely set aside, the stretcher itself is leaning on a tree. Well, you can grab that same wire and use it somewhere else. As far as I can recall, no other game I've played has reused inventory items in this way. Typically, when you are done with an object, it is gone, and if you need it again, it doesn't leave your inventory. In this case, it was a component in another inventory item and could be pulled out and used yet again. It's just a different take on things that I found interesting. In the end though, the characters didn't grab me enough to really care about how the story proceeded. For the sake of the review, that didn't keep me from playing it all the way through, but I don't know that I would have seen the game to the end if I hadn't needed to.
-J.R. Nip, GameVortex Communications AKA Chris Meyer
Related Links: Spirit Walkers: Curse of the Cypress Witch | iTunes Spirit Walkers: Curse of the Cypress Witch at G5 Games
F1 2012 Avengers Initiative