Shtriga: Summer Camp

The Good
This is a game that sticks to a fairly standard formula. It's well drawn and though the storyline is weak it's nevertheless interesting.

The game mechanics are spot on, everything works as it should. The autosave is excellent allowing the player can abort the game at any time, as I did when I closed the wrong program, and resume from the same point.

There's no voice acting at all but there is in-game music. The music is fairly generic for games of this type, long low chords with a piano tinkling over the top.

There are a couple of codes to be found in the game and these are recorded in the journal making them easy to locate when needed.

For me the delight of this game are the puzzles. There's some 'simon says' puzzles, at least one sliding block puzzle, a concentration puzzle, a couple of logic puzzles, some interesting tile swapping puzzles, a couple of procedural puzzles where flasks and ingredients have to be found and then used in the correct order, a couple of circuit/pipe puzzles where the player must arrange for water or current to flow correctly, and more. All puzzles can be skipped which, while standard in many games of this type, is still much appreciated

The Bad
I've played a few of these games recently, they're all in the Minds & Mystery compilation, and this is my least favourite. It's just missing something.

The artwork is excellent but some items are really very small and I couldn't pick them up, in fact I convinced myself that what I'd seen was not the object I needed and had to resort to the hint system to complete the puzzle.

The player does discover a map of the summer camp early on in the game but it's not used for anything. Other games have a feature whereby the player can use the map to move rapidly to a location and/or to see where the unresolved puzzle elements lie. However this game has neither of those aids.

At the bottom of the screen is the inventory, it appears automatically as the cursor approaches the lower edge of the scene. Also at the bottom edge is the navigation arrow that the player uses to retrace their steps to an earlier location. When playing the game there were several frustrating occasions where the inventory popped up when I was trying to exit a location, not a big deal and probably my own fault but this has not been a problem in other games.

The Bottom Line
This is a good, solid game with plenty of not-too-hard puzzles in it. It can be completed in a day and, though it has supernatural elements, it's not especially scary or frightening.