Insider Tales: Stolen Venus
March 25, 2009
Rating: -53
OS: Windows XP/Vista
CPU: 1.0 GHz or faster Processor
RAM: 256 MB
Hard Drive: 75 MB
Varied mini-games more than make up for the less creative hidden object gameplay, when you take a role of Francesca DiPorta to solve the stolen painting mystery. Enjoy your stay in the heart of Italy, but don’t forget the tasks you have at hand!
Insider Tales: Stolen Venus review
The “Birth of Venus” painting by Botticelli is stolen from the Uffizi Gallery, and Insider Tales: Stolen Venus game puts you in the shoes of the Inspector Francesca to solve the case. The game has quite a lot of problems and lack of imagination, but still provides nice puzzles fun, however not really at the hidden objects genre.
When it comes to storyline, there is nothing spectacular in the Stolen Venus – the story is shown to you through the cartoon cutscenes with comics-like speech bubbles. The game’s text translations are rather bad, which make the dull story even worse. So it’s not the story which you might enjoy playing this game.
The hidden object gameplay is also nothing imaginative. There are 2 level types – a usual search for the items on the list, and more interesting “search for item pieces”, where you search for small pieces to put together a bigger object. Unfortunately, the usual items on the list search is used more often. The item descriptions suffer for translation as well as storyline texts – some item texts might even be misleading or at least confusing. You do have an ability to click any item on the list to see it’s shape, so that more or less makes text mistakes less noticeable. You can also use hints, which re-charge over time. So, nothing new in the hidden objects department – anything you can expect from an average seek and find game.
What the Insider Tales: Stolen Venus shines in, is a very rich set of the inter-level mini-games. They’re great, fun and interesting! Unfortunately, they’re short.. as you should expect from a mini-game. The mini-games include: sequence repeat, spot the difference, rearrange pieces to free up space puzzles, jigsaw type puzzles etc.
Conclusions: Insider Tales: Stolen Venus is a mixed bag. From the good side, it has great mini-games which you will enjoy a lot. On the other hand, the bad translation, uninteresting story and common hidden objects gameplay (which suffers from translation and too much object repetition) lower the game’s value. Unfortunately, it’s not a collection of mini-games, so as a hidden object game, Stolen Venus does a pretty bad job, you can find much better seek and find games these days.
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