The whole family has been cooped up recently thanks to a fun summer cold. Now that everyone is on the mend, and we are getting back to our routine, I was looking for some entertainment that didn’t involve sing-a-longs or annoyingly cute creatures. I came across the recent release Echoes of the Past: The Kingdom of Despair and decided to give it a try.

I haven’t played any of the other Echoes of the Past series of games, but that hasn’t stopped me in the past and I figured I would be able to catch on to the storyline. However, there isn’t much in the intro… just a quick scene whisking you from a book store and into the witch’s cursed kingdom.

She closes your portal home, and you’re off to find the amulets you need to return. The witch has robbed the kingdom’s inhabitants of their love, compassion, and beauty, and they live bitter and alone. You must help everyone find what they lost in order to discover the hidden amulets and return home.

Echoes of the Past: The Kingdom of Despair has average graphics and animation. There’s a grainy quality to them and the animation can get pretty cheesy. The voice-overs are excessively dramatic and the voices don’t match the characters in my opinion.

I was grateful for a quickly recharged hint button and an interactive map to show active areas (available in the basic mode of play). I relied on them a few times when I was utterly lost as to where to go next. 

The game starts off a little slow as you discover random pieces that don’t seem to go in the areas you can enter, but the story picks up after a few scenes so stick with it. The gameplay was excruciatingly slow at times – retrieving an object once you found it took several seconds to put it into inventory.

On the positive side, I really enjoyed the mini-games in Echoes of the Past: The Kingdom of Despair and there were plenty of them. There were puzzles, mazes, and matching games, and many had a unique twist to them. Most were easy enough if you took a minute to think it through, but I did end up skipping one that was just annoyingly frustrating to me.

There are some hidden object scenes throughout the game as well – some were of the “find 10 of this object” variety and others were just your standard list of items.

I admit, I struggled with the last one or two objects in each scene and ended up using the hint feature just to move on. The slightly grainy and dark graphics made it tricky to identify some objects.

Overall, I think Echoes of the Past: The Kingdom of Despair has a good storyline and decent gameplay but the less than superior graphics and slow speed were deal breakers for me.