- House of 1000 Doors: Family Secrets Google Play download link
- By Alawar Entertainment, Inc.
- Adventure
- Price: Free
Overview
House of 1000 Doors: Family Secrets is a hidden objects adventure, challenging puzzler, and definitely one of the best experiences you can get from Google Play for free. The protagonist of this beautiful game is a successful writer Kate Reed, whose only book was a major success, but ever since that she was unable to produce any worthwhile story whatsoever, so it would be fair to say she faced a major writer’s block. She receives an invitation to the séance of spiritism, where she’s contacted by her long deceased grandmother who is asking her to help unravel the old family secret and set the poor souls free.
While the introductory storyline is nothing new, the performance and the challenges that follow the story are outstanding. Once Kate decides to take on the journey, she receives a map to a ghost family mansion that appears only at hidden locations, preventing the uninvited from peeking in.
As Kate finds the family mansion, she begins a journey of mysterious exploration, mind-boggling puzzles, and shocking family revelations in this intense, yet forgiving game.
Gameplay
While the storyline about saving the souls has quite a familiar touch to it thanks to the abundance of the games that are based on similar stories, House of 1000 Doors: Family Secrets is definitely one of the most interesting ones, performed in a meticulously drawn beautiful world of lost ghosts.
At the very beginning, Kate has to solve a few puzzles to get to the family mansion, but those are just to give you a heads-up and a touch of the general mechanics and logic of the game. Follow the instructions carefully to understand how you can find the hidden objects, how you can apply them, and how to get around in the game.
You have a Map you can use to get to any unlocked room in the mansion. You also have a Help button, which can point in the right direction – show you where to find that tiny object, or recommend you now move to a different room. Once you use one hint, you will need to wait some 60 seconds for the Help jar to be replenished. It doesn’t seem like a nag at all.
The house itself is a supernatural building traveling through time and space, haunted by ghosts of the restless and the miserable. Nevertheless, there is a group of gifted psychics who work to help those spirits find their salvation, and Kate happens to be one of them. She’s capable of seeing ghosts and more importantly, she’s capable of helping them find their way out.
Kate is in charge of helping other psychics in the house to solve a century-old murder case in order to restore her deceased grandmother’s reputation. It’s a lot of work for one gamer, but don’t worry – navigation and sorting things out is a matter of practice as you get to understand how the game works, which allows you to enjoy its complex, yet beautiful presentation and get through the obstacles.
Controls
You get various kinds of challenges, and each challenge has its set of controls. For example, there are plenty of mini-games where you get to solve puzzles, and each puzzle is unique and meticulously thought through. You can, of course, use the Skip button and the puzzle gets solved for you, but the best part is the feeling of accomplishment when you solve it yourself. On the other end, there are the find-the-hidden-objects scenes, where you have to find numerous hidden objects that are actually on the surface, but they are arranged in a way that will make you scratch your head and sometimes resort to the help button.
Controls are intuitive and easy-to-use.
Difficulty
House of 1000 Doors: Family Secrets is abundant in challenges of different difficulty levels, and the best part is you can take all the time you need to solve them, and even leave them for a later time, and get to the other tasks at hand. You can come back to the difficult puzzle at any later stage, or simply Skip something you cannot figure out. Overall, the difficulty is a well-balanced mix of accessibility and challenge, just enough to keep you hooked, but not stupefied or aggravated. Besides, the areas you can interact with are glowing, so you can always find them.
As a result of a complex inter-connectivity in the House, you get to play not just a series of scattered puzzles and challenges that make little sense, but get immersed in a movie-like story, where each solved puzzle gives you one more clue for a large-scale mystery. Hence, you get the naturally flowing experience, a consistent narrative that opens up new characters as you go. This beautiful consistency of the storyline entangled in mystery and puzzle solving is what keeps you hooked, but it is far from being the only virtue of the game.
Graphics
The graphics are splendid, and the occasional cut scenes make for movie-like experience. Another cool feature is the special mechanic that enables Kate to travel all over the house and among dimensions, crossing the line between the physical world and the world of the dead, which creates a large variety of settings and designs. Again, the Map in the House of 1000 Doors: Family Secrets is not only helpful, but also allows you to get to the desired location, without having to walk, just by teleporting.
Pros
- Animation and production values are superb, with the quality cut-scenes and great environments.
- Highly detailed gameplay that allows you to take your own pace and proceed as you like.
- A great abundance of worlds within the main storyline to explore that eventually creates the feeling like you’re playing several games instead of one, keeping the experience interesting, challenging, and fresh.
Cons
- Some mini puzzles seem to lack logic, but that’s just my personal impression.
- Not a very original plot, but hey, there are hundreds of saving ghost stories on Google Play, with only a few of them standing up to critique.
- There is no way to have an alternative ending, which is somewhat disappointing.
Conclusion
House of 1000 Doors: Family Secrets is a worthwhile hidden objects game and a puzzler with beautiful 3D graphics, meticulously drawn world of an old family mansion filled with mysteries and ghosts. This may not be a particularly new story to the veterans of the hidden object games, but for those of you who are new to the genre this game is a must-have title. The puzzles are created expertly; the navigation is easy, and clear objectives combined with a large variety of environments make for a really great game. It’s free, but you may want to only use WiFi to download it.
