Adera

Adera is a hidden object adventure puzzle game where you will have to travel to the Atacama desert in search of your grandfather. The game was developed by Microsoft so expect an not so ordinary hidden object game.

Take on the role Jane Sinclair, a young woman who has an overdeveloped sense for detail. It all starts when you get a strange note from your grandfather containing some hieroglyphs and a strange message.

After managing to decode the message, your father says you must travel to the Atacama desert where you should try and find Amaro, your grandfather. The only problem is that Amaro is said to be dead since you were ten years old. The mystery thickens as your father gives you a strange orb who’s said to belonged to your mother.

You must now travel to the desert and try to find a way to meet your grandfather. While flying to your destination, the helicopter is mysteriously transported to the bottom of the ocean, to the middle of the Antarctic and it crashes to the ground. With no way to leave, all that remains is exploring.

Adera features five different chapters, all of them containing several hours of gameplay. One chapter must be completed in order to be able to advance to the next one.

There are three different levels of difficulty you can choose from: Tourist, Explorer and Trailblazer, the last being the expert mode where you will have no skip button on puzzles and the potential interesting areas won’t sparkle.

I’d really enjoyed the hint system. When you first press the hint button, you will get a message carrying a clue to the whereabouts one or several items. Only if you want to see exactly where the items are located you can press the see more button.

The graphics are great, all the scenes are crisps and the level detail is beyond your average hidden object game. The music is not too intrusive, yet is perfect from allow you to emerge yourself in the adventure.

This is in my opinion a next-gen hidden object game with adventure elements that we should see more often. The story is modern yet it has fantasy elements and it’s quite catchy while the graphics will make players stay in front of the PC for hours.