Fall of the New Age

Fall of the New Age
by Shaman Games - December, 2013

Available at:
Playrix as Collector's Edition
Alawar as Collector's Edition /
Big Fish as Standard Edition only
GameHouse as Platinum Edition / Standard Edition
iWin as Collector's Edition / Standard Edition




In the dark times of the Medieval a baleful society of the Cult and its adherers strived to seize the rule over the city, control its inhabitants and destroy all sources of knowledge and culture. Help Marla uncover the secret conspiracy, release her kidnapped brother Ray and save the city! Solve numerous quests and puzzles, display courage and wit and don’t let the Cult take control over the Kingdom!

• Original medieval world
  
• 40 exciting locations
  
• Dozens of tricky mini-games
  
• Amazing cutscenes and 3D reels
  
• Collector’s Edition includes 12 additional locations, concept art, screensaver, wallpapers and bonus music tracks
  

Click images to enlarge
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Another Hidden Treasure!
 
  

BASED ON DEMO

FIRST IMPRESSIONS
Wow! Where are all these excellent little games coming from all of a sudden? And issued as a soft release!  Although its tale is dark, this game is a wonderfully light-hearted medieval dance with all sorts of quirky aspects and features. Lead in to the main menu is what I guess you’d call concept art of some of the characters from the game. Intro to the story is a delightfully constructed  melodrama where the actions tell the story, so there is no subtitle.

SIGHTS & SOUNDS
The graphics look very good. They have the feel of 3D about them, and the animation is excellent. There are many cut scenes at first, and they are also very well done. The game is a little dark, but that’s kinda nice. After so many vibrantly coloured games, I guess I’m up for a game that’s a little more sombre. The sounds of the game are great all round. And you can adjust ambient sound, sfx, music and voice separately. It all comes together to give the game a stylised feel that works well.

WHAT’S HAPPENING
Things are not going well for our heroine tonight. While in the upper story of a building she is robbing, her lookout has been nabbed, and as she comes back down to earth, she witnesses an evil-looking sacrificial rite on another floor. And as soon as she places her foot back on the ground, she is grabbed too. She wakes up in a cell, not aware of what is going on. But things pick up when an unknown ally gives her the means to escape. Now the two of them are putting as much distance as possible between themselves and the ‘scene of the crime’.

MAKING PROGRESS
I keep trying to decide if this game is a puzzle adventure or a HOPA. I’m leaning to the first, with a few of the puzzles being HOPs, and not many at that. One HOP I remember is a lengthy silhouette with interactive components. There are also a couple of list HOPs. Puzzles are fun, but one, picking locks by finding the point where the ring trembles, has been used 3 times already.

You have a directional help, and a journal and map (not interactive, no jump). These are to the right upper corner, and are not a SG, as a few players first thought. Hint is a ferret, but that’s all he is – a hint button. Those who don’t like any extra assistance will hate the black bar comments in this game. There is definitely a lot of hand holding if you want it. But you can choose your level of difficulty.

There are lots of more unusual things to do. There are opportunities to make disguises for yourself, each step along the process of donning the garb and wearing the makeup is a tiny mini-interactive piece of the overall puzzle.

You also have a slingshot, which you have oddly magical ammunition for, and its worth by that much increased. You find a beautiful box holding lovely gems, which when correctly combined give you information about the kingdom. A kind of medieval Wikipedia.

MY FINAL WORDS
I’m quite impressed. I certainly am surprised this did not rate higher fanfare. I like it and will certainly be buying it.

I Recommend This Game!

Whoops - never even heard of this game, but thanks to your review I'll be demo'ing it!  

 Can't wait to hear how you like playing dress-ups!!   

I just realized that this game is by the same folks who did Dreamscapes!   Big Fish did the same thing with Dreamscapes -- only carried the standard edition.

JustTheFacts wrote: Can't wait to hear how you like playing dress-ups!!   

Wha--    You tricked me!  

I made it through about 20 minutes of demo time. For me this game was a wreck: extremely sluggish (and that's with my system cursor. The game's cursor was *the worst* I've ever experienced) and various technical glitches, like a nonworking slingshot and other issues. It looks interesting but it doesn't work on my computer so it's a "no" for me.

Yeah, the dress-up corner.    It would be cool to collect and don disguises but the game's got to be fixed for me first.

I wonder why that is with some games. On mine I had no glitches whatsoever!

dress up was fun. you get to make a fake mustache, give yourself 5 o'clock shadow with coal, etc. Amusing.

oh, the slingshot works, but you have to click on the item in inventory that says fire or something, and then play a little target-shooting number to get it to work. If you stuff it up, you have to click on the gizmo again. It took me a few times at each time it was used to work out how to use it. But it is not hard target practice once you get the hang of it.

Oh I think mine was especially glitchy because it's an old computer, lol. Occasionally I'll find a game that barely works while others are raving about it.

The slingshot and target kept freezing. I had to exit and re-enter a bunch of times. But as I said, the whole game was sluggish and crawled in super slo-mo. Not meant to be for me, I guess.

I guess not. I am lucky. I happened to be looking to get a new pc at a time when Dell were doing crazy things, so I got a self-designed package, purely for playing HOPA games. And so I rarely have problems. But even still, I'm thinking I'm going to have to buy an external hard drive to hold all these darn games. (I'm not one for keeping them uninstalled until I want to play them - all 500 in total games I own are installed in my pc - which is now 50% taken up with games only  )

Trying to explain to the salesman that, no, I was not into games that required online access, speed responses or joysticks, but I DID need lots of storage space, good graphics package and sound system, took a little bit of work.  

Wow, you store *all* your downloadable games?! If you don't mind my asking, what kind of computer do you have? And is it a laptop or desktop?

I used to store some but now keep them at their download sites (Big Fish, Amazon, GOG, etc) -- might not be the smart thing, but it's easier for me to just delete at the end of the game and it keeps my computer from acting sluggish. I rarely re-play games anyway except for favorites, and even then it might be a year or more later that I touch them again.

TBH, there are plenty of games I was moderately to severely disappointed by and wish I could un-buy, lol. Or maybe they were okay as time fillers but I'd definitely never play them again. Once I get a new computer - and it has to be fairly soon I guess - I wouldn't mind storing maybe 30-50 favorites, but all of them? Nope.  

ETA - Okay now that I think of it it'd probably be more like 100... or so. 

The people at bfg cs nearly had heart failure. I was having trouble with the game manager getting hung up on me when I was downloading the 1+GB games. So I wrote asking what I should do, and they said maybe it's too many games, we usually keep about 30. At the time I had 300!!! Now I have 440 plus 30 demo versions not bought/reviewed yet. And the new game manager has no problems at all with that. (about 390 are bfg).

I have a Dell Inspiron 620 with Intel Core i3-2120. 4GB RAM 64-bit OS, 420GB Hard Drive. Windows 7 Home Premium, using Google Chrome for browser. It's not quite 2 years old now. I bought it when I joined BF.

I am very careful to keep the graphics package and drivers up to date. I use 350GB of the hard disk, with Windows, Office and games (and a very few MB given over to music and pix).

I was with Real Games way back when before I had to go offline for a few years. When I came back, they didn't exist, had to go with GH to get my games. Some of them had simply disappeared. I don't like that. If I could afford it I would have disks for all my games. But that's insane. Anyway, to be honest, I really just keep them there so I can look at the lovely icons all together in the "Adventures" folder. (Have about 60 'others') I even keep the games I hate.

Because I have so many, that's why I decided I better play them in some kind of logical fashion, so i decided to go through them alphabetically. After almost a year, I am in the middle of the Ms. But that's because I started reviewing them as well as playing.

Oh my gosh, there's absolutely no way I could keep all my games installed.   

I'm like R-Mom, my favorites stay and the rest are uninstalled & in my Purchase History (available if I want to play them again, hopefully & fingers crossed). Some are deleted and good riddance because I know I'll never play them again. Folders get deleted, also.
The same goes for my ancient desktop.

New games do not get installed until I'm ready to play them.

Here I am, OT again...oh, I plan on getting Fall of the New Age, Monday.

Me too! Fall is a definite - got a gift code from another reviewer, and this game has its name on it. She has the playrix CE version and has played it through and said it was great fun.

I also picked up Love Alchemy today at Legacy for $3.50 at the last of the 50% sale. But they both will just have to take pot luck on when I get to them. Have 44 games bought in last few months not yet played