Since I've played a few of the later entries, I wanted to go back to the start of the Detective's fairy tale cases.

Welp. The series has improved exponentially from this first installment, I can say that much for sure.

This one starts off with an intro story--basically the same as well-known versions, but the princess doesn't wake up when the rest of the castle does.

Your job is to wake her up, defeat the evil godmother, and stop the briars from overtaking what is now a modern city.

In my review of Portrait of the Stained Princess yesterday, I mentioned liking the hidden object puzzles and interactivity overall more than the other types of puzzles, but I take it back with this one.

There were maybe 6 other puzzles in the game, and like 3 of those were moving marbles across a board to their respective stands (think sliding puzzles in an RPG where you have to slide across ice to rocks in a certain pattern to get to the exit). Otherwise, it was tons and tons of hidden object scenes to build usable items. I like HOPs (obviously), but this was just so inundated with them and little else, and there was no actual story whatsoever after the intro and up until the very end to offset it. (The HOPs still mostly made sense, which is something I noted in my PotSP review as being really nice, but almost all of them were building some sort of weapon, wand, or model, so it was a lot of picking out pieces of rock/metal against rock walls.)

I kept playing thinking I'd eventually come across some notes or bits of story to expound upon the intro, but nope. Not a single thing. It was just tons of HOPs, going back and forth between waaay too many rooms/areas, and hoping for some narrative.

The music was still pretty solid, though.

So, I'm grateful for what this series has become, and the improvements that have been made to the gameplay, but this is not one I'd recommend on its own.

Took me about 2.5 hours, with distractions by cats/boyfriend/dog.