Awem Studios has created an interesting, albeit oddly titled, point-and-click/hidden objects game with a western theme. I was less impressed with this game than I was with some of Awem’s other offerings.
Although, I confess that western themes don’t do much for me, I tried to put that prejudice aside when playing the game, which held my interest enough for me to play through to the very end.
Like most other Awem titles, this one can be grabbed pretty cheaply for the Mac or PC directly from their Website. Although if you are going to look for a hidden object game within their catalog, we would suggest Letters from Nowhere before Golden Trails because it has a much better, more engaging story, even if that sounds odd for a hidden object game.
The story for Golden Trails begins with a sheriff in the old west who’s been sent to police a small town as an attempt to give him a break from his wild law enforcement career thus far. The sheriff reluctantly takes the job and immediately stumbles into a bank robbery.
Game play involves playing seek-and-find games to move the story forward, and solve the mystery of who robbed the bank. Gameplay moves forward in chapters with mini-games in between them.
Unfortunately, the mini-games aren’t particularly challenging, and while they are supposed to give us more details about the story, I didn’t learn anything that I hadn’t figured out from simply playing the main chapters.
One fun mini-game that appears between every chapter, in addition to the story mini-games, is the shooting gallery where bandits pop up and you have to shoot as many as you can in a set amount of time. The shooting gallery is quite fun.
You can also unlock an unlimited level, which involves racing the clock to find all the hidden objects in the scenes you’ve previously played.
As with most games, there is a room where you collect trophies for finding specific items or finding so many items in row or a set number of items under a certain amount of time, that sort of thing.
Golden Trails has lovely graphics, but the outlines for clicking on the hidden objects don’t seem particularly well defined, I found myself sometimes having to click two or three times on an object to get it to be recognized, because I wasn’t clicking in exactly the right place within the object. I find that to be seriously annoying and I dinged them points on graphics because of it.
I also found the music in this game to be sort of the generic western type that I found tiring after awhile.
Overall this isn’t an astounding example of its genre, but it’s not horrible. If you love hidden object games, you might want to check it out. The primary story line can be completed in a few hours, so it’s not a huge time investment, nor a huge monetary one.
Editor’s Note: Game reviewed on a Mac with a copy downloaded from the Awem Website at www.awem.com.