Enigmatis 2

HOGs & HOPAs For What Ails Ye

Artifex Mundi is widely considered the gold standard of HOPA, so I decided to play their highly-rated Enigmatis 2: The Mists of Ravenwood next. (They all have silly names.) Huge jump in production values. It's another over-the-top supernatural mystery, but it works as an interactive penny dreadful. The hidden object games fit the story and make thematic sense. The puzzles are more varied (although the game's insistence on puzzles where one mechanism moves two pieces, and you have to align all the pieces in a particular order, was really annoying) and there are two types of collectible items.  It has multiple difficulty levels where various hint systems are restricted at higher difficulties. It employs fast-travel. Puzzles can be skipped and hidden-object games can be replaced with match games. I enjoyed it much more than I expected!

The cheevos reflect the niche status. While comparatively inexpensive, $9.99 is not necessarily an impulse buy. At least 57% of players have played, 40% sat through all the early cutscenes, about 12%-ish snagged the collectibles, and 6% achieve a perfect game, which requires at least two playthroughs since there are achievements for completing all the HOGs and all the match games and you can't do both.

Artifex Mundi has a very loyal fanbase. Most of their games are rated highly by that base. I don't know how many of these I could play, but I did make a point of picking up a bundle to try later. They are comparable to genre pulp, very much a type of comfort food, so some players will happily inhale the library and others might only tolerate a few before needing a palate cleanser.