Awakening: Moonfell Wood
Game Review

Awakening: Moonfell Wood continues the adventures of Princess Sophia as told in the first game in the series - Awakening: The Dreamless Castle. She had fallen into a magical century-long sleep, and had woken up to find her land deserted with no fellow humans in sight. She has since escaped the castle grounds and is now on her way to Moonfell Wood to seek an audience with the Fairy Queen. Hopefully the fairies will have a way of finding out what happened to her people.

This game is a hidden object puzzle adventure game like its predecessor, and features the same beautiful fantasy atmosphere and scenery. You will travel into an enchanted forest in different day and night versions, and meet interesting characters like fairies, centaurs, pet dragons and many more. Most of them will help you in your quest to find the Fairy Queen and the answers she holds, but there's an evil witch and her minions lurking about too.

The gameplay has a standard puzzle adventure style, with a main interface where you see your immediate environment as well as any items that you pick up along the way. You explore the world by moving from scene to scene, each of which has multiple areas with which you can interact. A unique aspect of Moonfell Wood is that these scenes have both a day version and a night version, with different interactable objects in each version. For example, a dark alcove would only be visible during the day, while an object under a beehive can only be accessed while the bees go to sleep at night. You are able to toggle the forest between night and day by finding and activating a magic portal.

The areas of interest in each scene will either be objects that you can interact with, or will launch hidden object scenes, puzzles or minigames. Interactable objects usually require an item in your inventory, such as a stick to poke an unreachable mushroom. or nuts to give a squirrel (yes, this is a fantasy game). The hidden object scenes come in two flavors. There's the traditional jumbled mess of items from which you need to find a list of required objects. There's also an interesting type of hidden object game where you are presented with a nicely painted tarot card, and you are required to find all occurrences of a particular item on it. An example would be finding all 9 birds on the Forest card. This is reminiscent of the old visual puzzles where you have to spot how many faces there are in a picture.

The puzzles also fit the theme of the game very well. There are the jigsaw style puzzles where you need to assemble pieces of old parchment or pieces of broken vases together. There are also plenty of logic and pattern-matching puzzles. These puzzles aren't very difficult, and are fairly easy to solve if you pay attention to the various clues supplied to you. The puzzles are not meant to be brain-busting challenges, but serve as nice interludes to keep the gameplay from becoming too monotonous.

The artwork for the game is gorgeous, and has a painterly feel that fits the fantasy theme very well. The haunting night scenes with the purple and white glow from the crystals are especially beautiful. The music is also appropriate for the game, being enchanting yet soothing at the same time. There is a fair bit of 'adventuring' required in the game though, so be prepared to move back and forth between scenes as you solve puzzles and unlock new items to be used.

With many of the recent hidden object games featuring creepy houses haunted by supernatural powers, a fantasy adventure game like this with beautiful forests and magical faerie-folk is a very welcome change. You will love Awakening: Moonfell Wood if you liked other fantasy adventure games such as the original Awakening: The Dreamless Castle or similar games like the Enlightenus series. Get the Mac version here.

Check out the other games in this series!

Related PC Games at Big Fish Games:

Awakening: Moonfell Wood

Awakening: The Dreamless Castle

Dream Chronicles: The Book of Air Collector's Edition

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