Epic Adventures: Cursed Onboard is another HOA game that G5 Entertainment is using to bolster their library that is already bursting at the seams with these cookie-cutter knockoffs, and while some of these titles stand out as truly innovative and fun, sadly, this isn’t one of those times. If anything, this game felt more like another of their uninspired adventures, La Jangada; a lot of puzzles held together with a paper-thin plot and poor presentation.
You’ll play Melissa Alan; a detective trying to solve a mystery from the 1970’s involving a family that vanished on a cruise up the Amazon River. Things start off well enough with a suitably interesting story and setup for the adventure at hand, and even the first few visuals manage to suck you in, but once you get past that first puzzle the game starts sinking fast. This game was obviously developed overseas and suffers from numerous translation problems similar to those found in La Jangada. While these could have been avoided by using silhouettes or some visual hint, trying to understand exactly what you are looking for becomes this game’s greatest challenge and ultimate failure.
Once the story slips into the background you are left with 90% hidden-object puzzles, which only exasperates the translations issues. And when you combine that with the amount of puzzles that have you searching the same uninspired (and even ugly) backgrounds over and over for different items, you’ll find your finger sliding over to the hint button more often than you’d like. Even when the game tries to throw in some random non-hidden-object puzzles it fails miserably. Combination puzzles are merely tedious trial and error affairs and other puzzles that require special objects to complete will remove those items from your inventory after their initial use, but since many of these objects are required for multiple puzzles you’ll have to replay levels to reacquire the item.
With broken puzzles, poor graphics, and a story that slips into obscurity an hour into the game only to resurface for the anti-climactic ending, this is one adventure not worth taking. It lacks any of the key elements required by the HOA genre, and when the game is so boring and mediocre that you merely want to tap the hint button to get through it, only to be disappointed by the end… well, let’s just say that Epic Adventures: Cursed Onboard HD is far from epic and not much of an adventure. Save your money and buy just about anything else in the G5 library.
