Parallels Cross

There are plenty of weird houses and mansions around the world, and they are not all abandoned. Sometimes it’s the way they are decorated, while other times is just the fact that no one lives there anymore and bad things tend to happen to those who are too curious. In short, abandoned places never seem to be very welcoming to those who want to investigate them.

Parallels Cross is an adventure game with plenty of puzzles for you to solve, in which the main plot revolves around a car trip gone wrong. Although there are some hidden object sequences involved, such as when you need to scour the environments for anything useful to help you advance, most of the puzzles are more interesting than that, which is a nice change to see in the genre.

As mentioned before, the story is about a mother who loses her son in a weird mansion after hitting a block in the road. Although the mansion looks inhabited, it would seem like strange experiments take place in it, which is why the child may be in a lot of danger. Hence, the rest of the game revolves around your attempts to enter the mansion and figuring out how to retrieve your son.

The puzzles are not always very complicated, but some of them require quite a bit of tinkering before you are able to figure them out. It’s not always clear what you have to do, so there are times when you have to use the trial and error method. It’s all pretty fun, on the other hand, because it’s quite a thrill to search for clues and figuring out the solution to a tough puzzle.

As you might expect, the graphics are in 2D, and they are pretty basic from a technical point of view. Even so, the artwork is sublime, and the environments designed by the artists are quite breathtaking sometimes. The cutscenes go well with the atmosphere as well, as does the soundtrack and the voice acting.

In the end, Parallels Cross has a lot of content to keep you engaged, and the puzzles are challenging enough to make you want to stay until they are finished. The story is mighty intriguing too, although pretty simple in regards to characters and events.