Puppet Show: Arrogance Effect

Solving mysteries is a big part of adventure games, especially if they are designed to keep your imagination going at all times. Sometimes they are fairly obvious from the beginning, but as long as the game keeps challenging you with puzzles and riddles it shouldn’t be too much of a problem. Thus, the HOPA genre has a tight grip on the casual audience, thanks to their simple mechanics and familiar interface.

Puppet Show: Arrogance Effect is a hidden object adventure game in which you play as a journalist trying to investigate a meteorite crash, but everything goes wrong as your investigation is interrupted by an attack. The fans of the genre should feel right at home from the first minutes of gameplay, but there are some shortcomings as well, especially in the puzzle department.

To begin with, the story is not as intriguing as it tries to be, given the fact that most of the plot is very predictable and repetitive. Hence, your photographer goes missing after the aforementioned attack, so you have to split your efforts between investigating the crash and finding out what happened to the photographer. There are some twists every now and again, but nothing too crazy.

As it’s always the case, the action revolves around tackling every scene in a linear fashion, which means that you are pretty much forced to follow a strict path throughout the story. Every scene features a handful of clues you must gather, as well as puzzles that must be solved in order to advance. Since only useful items can be picked up, this is mostly a clickfest with no actual substance to it.

The mini-games are no different either, since most of them are as basic as they can get, including jigsaw puzzles and match-three sections. A lot more could have been achieved with the elements at its disposal, but the developers have chosen to disregard innovation entirely. Things are a bit better in the graphics department, but then again the static backgrounds are not marvels of ingenuity either.

All things considered, Puppet Show: Arrogance Effect is not as engaging as some HOPAs out there, especially since it does not try very hard in the story department or with the puzzles. Hence, it just might be fun enough for a complete playthrough, but it might also be too boring for the veterans of the genre.

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