Spirit Walkers: Curse of the Cypress Witch (SW) was free for a time and I figured I’d give it a try. I thought it was developed by the same group that made Master of Mystery: Crime of Fashion, but actually developed by a different studio. Both games are a blend of hidden object and puzzle solving. But, I think the one game that did it best was Mystery of Mortlake Mansion. Nonetheless SW was a good game with a variety of puzzles beyond hidden objects. However, the problem I had with Master of Mystery: Crime of Fashion was selecting an item and having it not match up with where my finger was also present in this game.

The story behind SW is fairly simple. You are dragged along on a trip because a few of your friends heard about a mysterious ghost in the forest. However, you aren’t interested in tromping around the woods, so you are tasked to make a base camp and intend to take a relaxing afternoon looking out over the lake. Except, a couple of your friends come back yelling about spotting a ghost. As you go to follow, some mysterious power breaks the bridge just before you are about to cross and you now have to figure out how to repair it in order to follow after your friends.

The larger story unravels as you go further into the story. There is, indeed, a ghost who was cursed into that form because the father of the man she was supposed to marry didn’t approve of the union. In the end, you end up time traveling to prevent the curse from happening.

I didn’t pay attention much as the story itself didn’t interest me so much as the puzzles did. Rather than a typical hidden object game where you are requested to find a list of objects in one scene, in SW, you are more often looking for objects that can help you solve the current puzzle so you can move forward. Looking back, it is similar to LucasArts’ point-and-click adventure games, particularly where you are collecting items and using them later on.

There are additional puzzles, some complicated and some pretty straightforward. I was stuck on a flipping puzzle game that I ended up coding it in JavaScript because I was so intruiged by it. I couldn’t figure out the solution myself (it didn’t have a symmetrical solution that I could find) and was forced to watch a YouTube video. It seems like guides for casual games are not being written, which is regretful. Another semi-complicated puzzle game was a series of buttons arranged in a circle. Pressing one button lifts up the two buttons next to it. The goal was to get all of the buttons down. I was able to solve that one. These puzzles made the game different from others that I have played.

Controls are simple and typical – tap and drag. Sometimes tapping didn’t register because it wasn’t quite within the bounds of an object’s hit box. Sometimes dragging to use an item didn’t work because the item you’re dragging isn’t within the bounds of the target object’s hit box. Doesn’t matter where your finger is. I had to use the tooltips, which had a higher chance of actually causing objects to interact, but even that was still imperfect. It wasn’t enough to make me put down the game, but it was still mildly frustrating.

I didn’t keep track of how long I played. Several hours because I was often playing while half-watching/listening to a TV show. I would suggest playing it for those who like puzzle games and want to feel something of a progression via a story. It’s an easy game to put down and pick up.