By Ned Jordan
In The Magician's Handbook you've ordered a magical book from a late night
shopping show on television on an impulse and are surprised to find that not
only an it teach you real magic, but that it whisks you away to a place called
The Cursed Valley. Here with book in hand you must learn magic by finding hidden
objects scattered around the various sites within the valley, and just maybe
you'll lift the curse in the process.
The story in this game essentially serves to introduce each level, which
consists of finding a minimum number of hidden objects in three or four
different locations, followed by a puzzle. Solve the puzzle and you unlock a new
spell and complete the level. There are thirteen levels in all, and twelve
hidden object locations that you'll revisit several times during the course of
the game.
Each level has a suitably magical theme, such as a wizard's lab, a haunted
house, and a main street lined with magic shops. The levels are all hand-drawn
which gives the game a nice artistic aesthetic. The hidden objects range from
items hidden in plain sight to those devilishly worked into the background or
other objects. The game also enjoys wordplay, so when looking for an object such
as a scale you need to be on the lookout for both weight-measuring devices and a
sequence of musical notes. If you have trouble finding an object, a "reveal"
spell that you earn pretty early on in the game can be used to expose it. You'll
also be working against the clock to find everything, but the time limits are so
generous in the game that they are never an issue. The puzzles at the end of
each level require you to find matching sequences of objects in a grid (a sort
of variation on Bejeweled) or to find the parts of a magical phrase in a screen
full of phrase fragments that occasionally switch places.
Because the game revisits its locations, you'll find some items pretty
quickly later in the game since you've already spent some time scanning the
level. This is also helped by the fact that the list of the items that you need
to find seems to be randomized, and you'll sometimes be searching for the same
object that you found on a previous visit to the location. Overall, the game is
probably on the easier side of things as far as hidden object games go, and the
level-ending puzzles won't prove to be much of an obstacle to the puzzle-playing
gamers that this game is aimed towards. Overall the game is a relatively casual
way to spend a little gaming time that will appeal most to fans of the hidden
object genre. If this is your sort of game you'll probably be happy enough
spending a few hours with it before moving on to the next game, but it's not the
sort of game that will have universal appeal.
Final Rating: 70%
