Elementals: The Magic Key is a new puzzle adventure game from NevoSoft. It meets us with Albert, a young magician, who searches for the Key of Eiron and his sister kidnapped by Sibelius, an evil wizard.

The game has you solving a variety of logical puzzles in order to make your way through a fantasy world. It has a slight resemblance with Dream Chronicle series. Honestly, the storyline is confused but still has lots of fun.

As for the gameplay it may fall into the hidden object genre, though the focus seems to be more on adventuring. The whole process is mainly based on puzzles. There you can find a checkers-type game, a few hidden object scenes, some inventory puzzles, and a variety of puzzles that have you rearranging pieces so they fit properly and even something like solitaire where you arrange cards in order. The hidden object scenes are simple, and usually involve finding objects of a certain type, like finding all the shards or scrolls in a particular scene. You get unlimited hints, and you can skip any puzzles that you don’t like.

Nevertheless, the game prepossesses with its vivid graphics, since there are lots of cool lighting effects, and the environments are very unique. So we can say that Elementals: The Magic Key stands out against a background of other similar products.     

4, November 2009