The Far Kingdoms: Elements

Review

The witch Morgana cast a spell on your kingdom. Every living form has been turned into statues and you, Arianna, must find the three elements of air, water and fire to reverse that curse. There is no time to waste if you want to save your kingdom!

The Far Kingdoms: Elements is a mix of hidden objects and match 3 games developed by Lazy Turtle Games and published by HH games. You ‘ll take on Arianna’s role and save your kingdom from Morgana’s curse.

The game as three levels of difficulty: casual, expert and hardcore. Essentially, you can access more hints in the causal difficulty than from the hardcore.

The game begins with a short introduction to how the story begins. Then, you’ll be stuck in a room and need to find the key to unlock the door. As with any game of this genre, you’ll be using your mouse to hover over the image until you reach an object that sparkles, and by clicking on it, you’ll start either a hidden object segment or a match 3 game.  

The hidden objects scenes are well done, and most of the objects are challenging to find within the image. The match 3 are setup in a few different ways: the first one is when you have an object in a tile positioned at the top of the grid with the goal being to get this object on the bottom row of the grid to acquire it; the second is pretty much the same but you have to acquire between 3 to 8 of the same objects to win the match; the third one is when you have to move an object from the left side of the grid to another one which is on the opposite side of the grid. This version can scroll between to 2 to 3 screens of length, and you create the path by matching 3 objects, which in turn will fill up three tiles at a time. The all bosses fight is a match 3 affair, and in these you have to collect 10 rubies to defeat each of the bosses. I enjoyed the layout of the grids that changed frequently, which is a great in my opinion!  You might get stuck in a match 3 game but don’t worry, you can swap the grid around by clicking on the swap button underneath frog image - you won’t miss it!

Early in the game, you’ll find a red amulet and every now and then you might struggle how to get to the next hidden and objects due to the simple fact that you don’t have any items in your library to access a specific area within the image. The Amulet has power and can clear some obstacles, but not all.

The game takes around 3 and a half hours to complete, which is pretty good for the genre.  The graphics are good, and the soundtrack suits the game nicely.