So, it’s been a while since I’ve had a minute to sit down and play a game breathe. Work, life and home have been beyond hectic so when I finally had a chance to relax, (and no little hands fighting for the keyboard) I checked to see what new releases were out that piqued my interest.

Queen’s Tales: The Beast and the Nightingale came out around Halloween and has some great reviews so I decided to give it a try.  The story is reminiscent of Beauty and the Beast, and I’m always a sucker for fairytale-themed games.

Queen’s Tales: The Beast and the Nightingale has fantastic graphics and average animation. I know it’s picky but it drives me nuts when the character’s face doesn’t match the voice over… it’s like watching a bad 80s kung fu flick. The music and sounds weren’t too intrusive, but I tend to turn them down so I can listen to the voice-overs more easily. Not that those were all good either – one creature I encountered called a “weepie” sounded like a whistleblower on a 60 minutes interview, complete with voice changing effect. The weepie was a little creepy, and I skipped through as much of the dialog as I could.

One feature of Queen’s Tales: The Beast and the Nightingale I really liked was the ability to customize every aspect of the game play – not only can you select the typical features of volume, cursor, and screen display, but you can also chose at what rate you would like the hint and skip features to regenerate as well. The scale ran from 5 seconds to 200 seconds, so there’s truly a level for every player.  In addition to the custom settings, you can choose from the three pre-set levels ranging from casual to expert, and modify the changes at any point during the game.

The storyline in Queen’s Tales: The Beast and the Nightingale was a bit confusing in my opinion with many different aspects. The main story follows the lead character in a Beauty and the Beast-like tale. 

Her father found a seemingly abandoned nightingale in a castle and decided to bring it home for his daughter. The nightingale actually belonged to a Beast who demands the man’s lifelong servitude as penance for stealing.

His daughter valiantly decides to take his place and sets off to return to the Beast’s castle by midnight to fulfill her father’s sentence. Her fiancée, Dorian, tries to stop her and mysteriously disappears. On the journey to the castle, a dark witch repeatedly appears in attempts to keep the young woman from her destination. I’m sure all the storylines come together in a tidy little package in the end, but it makes for a confusing start to the game with so many characters.

The hidden object scenes were different and interesting – they depicted more of a scene than a random pile of junk. You also have the ability to change the HOS to a puzzle and back again, so you can choose which you would rather complete. I enjoyed the HOS and found them easy enough to complete without a hint, especially if a scene is repeated.

Likewise the mini-games were interesting and challenging enough to keep me engaged and usually not frustrating enough to need the skip feature. The games are similar in style to most HOS games – matching games, rotating puzzles, ordering objects or symbols – and each ties well to the storyline and accomplishes a goal or a task to keep moving forward.

Overall, I enjoyed a lot of features of the game – the customization of every aspect, the unique puzzles and HOS, and the quality of the graphics. I was less than impressed with the complications of the storyline and some of the characters and voice acting. While they took something away from the gameplay for me and prevented a perfect score, Queen’s Tales: The Beast and the Nightingale was still a fantastic game with great potential.