Dream Hills: Captured Magic

Dream Hills: Captured Magic
by Mystery Tag - December, 2013

Available at:
Big Fish
GameHouse
iWin



Many years ago, Dream Hills was a merry, bustling kingdom. Its residents led a fairy tale life, good always triumphed over evil, and everyone was happy – until, on the day of the festival of Great Balance, the evil witch poisoned the Fairy Godmother who had been watching over the kingdom and keeping it from evil. Everything changed then. Dream Hills was cast into darkness, and countless troubles began to assault its residents. Many years later, the Fairy Godmother finally woke up, free from the spell. She now must restore the fairy tale kingdom the witch has destroyed. Help the Fairy Godmother find her magic wand, get rid of the evil witch, and break the curse.Solve puzzles, help your favorite fairy tale characters, and collect magical artifacts. Give this story a happy ending!

• Visit 35 locations
  
• Enjoy picturesque fairy tale landscapes
  
• Meet characters you have known and loved since childhood
  

Click images to enlarge
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(Good) Kids’ Game (I Hope)
 
   

BASED ON DEMO

FIRST IMPRESSIONS
This game, at first glance, seems very much a kids’ game. We are the Fairy Godmother, found in fairy tale circumstances, among many well known fairy tale characters, and pretty cartoonish graphics. None of which would necessarily make it a kids’ game, I suppose, when you think about some of the great fantasy games we’ve loved this year.

But this one adds simplistic and repetitive gameplay and simplistic and repetitive music to the mix, and those things I DO believe are only truly appreciated by the younger crowd. (Let me give my apologies early, to any grupps who love this game.)

SIGHTS & SOUNDS
The game is attractive enough, very fanciful as you’d expect, good quality but not much on the detail. The music really bugs me, not so much for its repetitiveness, as for its simplistic few bars. There are also not many sound effects and the ambient noise seems to consist entirely of tweeting birds, which again strikes me as too basic.

WHAT’S HAPPENING?
Well, you wake up from a nap to find far too long has gone by for it to have been an ordinary nap, you are alone in Rapunzel’s tower, and you are the Fairy Godmother. You realise evil is afoot, and you escape the tower, hoping to get to your cottage, where you have your magic wand, which can be used to fix all this mess up.

Instead of an adventure with a clear goal in mind, I kept getting confused, as more and more story book characters were turned up everywhere. None of them were convincingly the characters we know, and their stories are not part of this game. But their existence overshadows any other plot feature that might have made things clearer.

Anyway, we get to the cottage, and the wicked witch has stolen our wand, and we of course must get it back.

GAMEPLAY
Again, simplistic. There are word list HOPs and ones where you must find multiple items. The images are clear and the items easy to find. The puzzles are almost ridiculously simple, and are already repeating themselves. Not exactly, but the same puzzle with a different image. For example, the line up the rings puzzle has appeared twice so far, the only difference being what was printed on the rings.

There are, apparently, 4 magic tools we will acquire, which give us 4 new special abilities, but so far we have not found them.

VERDICT

A good game, but only for the younger crowd.

I Recommend This Game!

Great info, Justie!  My sis and eldest will probably love it!

Who is the developer, please?

Mystery Tag

Mystery Tag, interesting   I don't recall seeing that dev name before!

Thanks!