Once Upon a Time: Baba Yaga

The Good
I'm writing this review after having written the review of "Once Upon a Time: Abracadabra", I also played this game as the last from the series... Once again: the series seems quite cohesive, so I really think it's best to compare the reviews. Therefore I will now write about the "pros and cons" in a slightly more condensed way.
Again, the game has beautiful graphics. The first scene is not as good as in "Abracadabra" - the winter graphics looked better for me, but still the scenery remains nice, with mountains in the distance and a different appearance of the castles. Now they seem strangely pseudo-Middle Eastern - unfortunately, without much influence on how they look inside... (More about this in "The Bad".)
The action sequences - more precisely, the ones in the forest - are still quite nice, even though irritating and not really engaging. But it would be too much to call these sequences another bad idea - I quite liked them, it's only a pity they don't have a whole good game to match...

The Bad
All problems from "Abracadabra" apply as well: not much music, an irritating difficulty level... Another thing: compared to the "jump'n'run" sequences in the forest, the "fights" are very easy and even less interesting... The game also suffers from the copy protection problem - and the code combinations are not the same for all games from the series... The real problem with copy protection in these games seems to be as follows: the games were so non-popular and the phrase "Once upon a time" is so popular by itself that finding the codes really isn't so easy. It IS possible - anyway, I did complete the game - but quite frustrating nevertheless.
And another problem, even though it's quite random to complain about it here - I just don't know in which order the two games ("Abracadabra" and "Baba Yaga") were made. I played them in this order... Interiors in "Baba Yaga" are almost entirely copied from "Abracadabra"! (Or the other way around.) In the homes the image is only flipped and the color scheme is different, this is almost the only difference! Even Baba Yaga, as she appears in the protagonist's window, seems strangely similar to the evil sorcerer from "Abracadabra"... The story is almost entirely the same - just change the characters, change the magic items (magic glove instead of magic bracelet etc.) - everything else remains the same.

The Bottom Line
Baba Yaga is an evil witch from Slavic fairy-tales - more precisely, not always that evil, sometimes she is rather just annoying or not very clever and easy to outwit. (The name may be familiar for game fans - indeed, she made a much better and more interesting appearance in the first and fourth part of Sierra's "Quest for Glory".) Still, she doesn't suit the game's pseudo-Middle Eastern architecture - it's as if the designers just threw in any ideas they had (still) left... Unlike the third game in the series, which is based on a well-known story - "Little Red Riding Hood" in Charles Perrault's telling - "Abracadabra" and "Baba Yaga" both use many well-known motifs from fairy tales, folklore, magic beliefs etc., but don't follow any pre-existing story that closely. They just use whatever motifs they like, without attention to the cohesion of the whole story. These two are really twin games and, considering that "Abracadabra" itself is a bad game - it's not exactly a good thing...