The Enchanted Kingdom: Elisa’s Adventure Review and Tips

This is an Android port of a casual PC game and it combines a strange backstory and colourful characters with a lot of puzzles and mini-games.

You play Elisa, a peasant girl who just might be the princess and heiress to the throne of Arroyo. In order to take the throne you have to find the Royal Ruby. With the help of the befuddled mage Maron you’ll travel the mystical kingdom helping to solve your future subject’s various bizarre problems.

You’ll encounter dragons, witches, giant squids and talking plants before it’s all over and you’ll need to solve a variety of puzzles in order to amass the resources you’ll need to build up your town. The story unfolds through a number of cut scenes and you travel across the kingdom on the map screen solving puzzles and constructing buildings in order to advance.

This is a strange mixture of gameplay, some of it enjoyable and some of it pretty tedious. The bulk of the game is focussed on match three puzzles and there are two types. One where you have to drag your finger across the screen to match three or more of the same coloured crystals and one where you have to switch crystals to make patterns of three or more. When you match them up they bounce off the board and you’ll gradually unlock new tiles and power-ups until the puzzle is complete.

The match three puzzles are fun and addictive. There’s a hint system to help you if you get stuck and as the levels progress and the difficulty ramps up you’ll also need to use your power-ups which can blast crystals from the board or even remove whole rows or columns. You’ll build these up as you go and you can also buy them once you have built the market in your town. They start off quite simple, but the difficulty really ramps up steeply as the game progresses and you can end up spending an hour or more on some of the tougher challenges.

The other main type of puzzle is a simple hidden object game where you have a list of objects to find in a crowded room. You simply tap on the object to mark it off and once again there is a hint system in case you get stuck. If you have a small touch screen then you might find this a little fiddly but for the most part it works well.

To round things off and provide a little variety you’ll also find word puzzles where you need to organize letters to reveal a sentence, picture puzzles like jigsaws and weighing puzzles where you need to match the weight of some ingredients on a set of scales. The jigsaws and word puzzles are quite easy and fun. The weighing game is the worst of the bunch and proves to be very boring. You need to wait for the scales to settle after adding weights and it simply isn’t much fun.

In terms of art the game looks quite good. The characters are comical, the backdrops are well drawn and the puzzles are clearly laid out. It can be difficult to see all the details for the hidden object game and the map screen and resource icons aren’t always easy to read — again the bigger your screen, the better.

The character dialogue is revealed via text and to be honest it could use some work. There are some unintentionally funny translations in there and some terrible grammar. The sound and music is basic and in keeping with the action.

This isn’t really the kind of game I generally play but it is surprisingly fun. The match three puzzles have a real addictive hook, as you’ll know if you’ve played anything like Bejeweled before, although the grid here is a hexagonal pattern. The other puzzles aren’t as engaging, but apart from the weighing game they offer the same casual fun factor.

It’s nice that the game is completely free of violence. All the problems you’ll encounter have a peaceful solution and this is suitable for all ages, although kids are going to struggle with the harder puzzles later in the game. For 99p or $1.50 this is worth a look and there’s plenty of puzzle content on offer for your money.

The Enchanted Kingdom: Elisa’s Adventure Tips
Here are a few tips that will hopefully help you out, if you have any others then please post a comment.

• You only have a limited number of hints so save them up for the more difficult puzzles. This applies to your match three power-ups too. Don’t be tempted to use them all up early because the puzzles get far more difficult as you progress.
• Remember that you can always buy some of the resources you need and extra power-ups at the market in your town.
• A lot of your raw resources will need to be processed in order for you to produce the resources you need. Just go into the building and check what resource it requires and then go for the corresponding resource puzzle on the map by clicking on it twice.
• You can find extra hints by tapping on faint, grey question marks in the hidden object puzzles. Try to make sure you gather all of these before completing the puzzle.
• When you are playing the match three puzzles you need to unlock all the blocks and turn off the coloured tiles. It’s not always a good idea to just make any match you can, try to work the colours you need towards the coloured tiles or you can find yourself in an endless loop.
• When you match more than three crystals you’ll sometimes notice gold coins on the board. These are like wild cards and they can serve as any colour of crystal so they can be quite useful.