Anka Review

Who says all of PC gaming has to be masculine buff dudes shooting each other or a commander strategically leading troops into battle? PC gaming has an open invitation for developers to make games of any nature and calibre to their hearts’ content, and sure enough, there will be an audience to enjoy that game. With Anka, that audience will most likely be children under the age of twelve.

Anka is a hidden object adventure-puzzler developed by Ovogame with a prominent lightheartedness. It’s designed with the casual market in mind, and even more-so for new players to video games. Just as with any adventure game, Anka incorporates logical problems into the package, along with numerous mini-games to keep the gameplay fresh.

The player takes on the role of the titular character in a colorful anime-esque drawn world. After getting acquainted with the family and lifestyle, the journey in Anka begins. The introductory play-style is of the hidden-object nature. Finding eggs around the house gets the player’s training rolling for the rest of the game. Get used to this mechanic, since for a vast majority of the time you’ll be on the prowl for items to solve your puzzles. Thus begins the game’s major flaw. It’s habitual to randomly click all over the screen until something happens. This isn’t a problem unique to Anka alone – it has always been a hurdle in hidden object games. Some games, like 3 Cards to Dead Time, have a way to get around this issue by limiting the number of clicks you can attempt whilst on a screen. However, since Anka is somewhat designed for the casual market, any element of gameplay difficulty is missing. So click away to your heart’s content.

Remember how your parents told you to not to talk to strangers? Anka doesn’t.

The puzzles are pretty typical for an adventure game; find seemingly random crap to do really random things, like building a scarecrow to… scare the crows away from your farm. I also find it quite funny that a little ruffian like Anka handles stuff like cooking food, chopping wood with a deadly ax, and other various activities that would normally kill a boy with ease. Oh, about that boy. He’s kinda like one of those stereotypical kids in the movies that know exactly how to deal with problems, but somehow gets into trouble regardless. Not that this matters much in the overall view, it’s just an observation.

As for the puzzle design itself, don’t expect anything too brain-heavy. The logic to the puzzles, while serviceable, isn’t something that should be looked upon for adventure game designers. Cooking a pizza for a train full of hungry passengers is as hard as it sounds. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out you need a stove, cheese, sauce, and the rest to make it. And all the required parts are scattered around the room somewhere. Just get your index finger ready to click all over the screen until you find the stuff. As long as you have eyesight and an intelligence level above the third grade, you’ll be just fine. If you don’t, however, you can wait for a specified time to elapse and gain access to a hint menu.

Mini-games take up a large portion of Anka.

Once you get settled with the hidden object portions, Anka throws a curve ball by means of mini-games. These games range from Mahjong to jigsaw and crossword puzzles, with numerous others. These many smaller portions build up to being the vast majority of your time spent in Anka. In between all the object finding, you’ll play these mini-games to solve puzzles, which progresses the story farther. Just as with the object finding sections, you can skip these games after a certain allotted time, At the end of the journey, you’ll be able to play these mini-games at any time from an access menu.

Hotspots are easy to notice.

Oh yeah, the story. I’m going to lay out the entire thing right here, because it’s the most hilarious story I think I’ve seen in a long time. Let us begin. So after Anka collects all the eggs and builds a scarecrow, he starts getting worried after his mom has been out to town for a lot longer than expected. He talks to his dad, whom goes looking for his beloved mother, and asks Anka to take care of the farm while he’s gone. Upon his duties, Anka comes across an unconscious man at the nearby riverside. This man, an escaped convict, tells Anka that he was wrongly accused for a crime committed by someone else. He asks for the boy’s help in repairing his getaway canoe (getaway canoe). After fixing it up with bee honey and a hand-cloth, the convict is off. By that time, it’s been a few hours since his parents have been gone, so Anka takes matters into his own hands. He ventures to the local town and asks the sheriff for any sign of his parents. Apparently, his mother was arrested for murdering the town doctor (arrested for murdering the town doctor).

Anka begins collecting evidence to show his mother was framed, like any good son. He gathers sufficient evidence against the town’s recent mysterious visitor, and his mother is set free. However, in a conversation with the condemned, he reveals to Anka that he and The Duke, his associate, has taken his father away. Anka and his mother badger the sheriff to stall the man’s sentence of hanging so they could interrogate the information out of him. The sheriff says it’s out of his hands. Anka visits the man at the jail and has a compromise – he’ll give Anka the location of where his dad is at if he sabotages the gallows in which he is hanged (this is a children’s game). Anka does so, and takes a train to the town where his father is located. He arrives and finds his father jailed in a cave. It is revealed he was bitten by a poisonous bat (poisonous bat). Anka is determined to save his dad, so he travels to a distant Indian settlement to retrieve an antidote. So he does, and saves the day. At the end, the murderer is hanged and The Duke flees society and is presumed dead. Anka, ladies and gentlemen.

Overall, Anka is a decent mix of casual adventure and puzzle game; it isn’t too hard to dive into the gameplay. I recommend the game to younger children, as it’s a good way to introduce them to logic problems. However, if you don’t want them to grow up as a mass murderer, I recommend playing through the game yourself and only allowing them to play the unlocked mini-games.