Love Chronicles: The Sword and the Rose Collector's Edition

After expelling the dark forces from a placid realm and rescuing the beautiful princess in the first episode, Love Chronicles: The Spell, the adventurous young aristocrat sets out on travels to look for endmost lands of the earth. When he finally reaches one, it is bewitched in pursuance of a classical plot and needs someone to lift the curse. Love Chronicles: The Spell was given quite a mediocre estimation by critics and users in due season. Therefore Vendel Games have tried to take into account all the remarks and comments developing the second game of the series, Love Chronicles: The Sword and The Rose.

As you make a study of the mysterious island you meet a curly red-haired girl. She asks you to collect all the petals of a rose which carries the witch’s curse. Thus the gameplay gets you spatiate from one scene to another. But you have not just to find the 33 petals. They are frozen in ice as well as everything around them, and you must ice them out before you can pick them. Clicking on the rose, the whole frozen landscape melts and comes to life. In the course of the gameplay you come across other complicated puzzles apart from looking for the rose petals. What is pleasant about them is that they fit into the storyline and game locations.

The only but rather unhandy failing of Love Chronicles: The Sword and The Rose is that it’s not explained to the player how these puzzles actually work. There are some brainteasers which are difficult to guess their mechanics by yourself, but there are no explanations or hints of how they function. Moreover, you can’t go back to the previous scenes.

The graphic design of the game is superb or even more. It’s quite elaborate hand-drawn style doesn’t hinder the Hidden Object researchers who used to see photo-realistic locations for the best results. There is no voice-acting in the game though, its background music provides an unobtrusive but artful and appropriate backdrop. Nothing annoys the ear, but for the voice over which breaks the sense of the gameplay.

10, June 2011