Echoes of the Past 2: The Castle of Shadows Collector's Edition

Players move around environments—starting in a town, then into a castle and surrounding grounds—much like a point-and-click adventure game.

Our goal is to find key inventory objects and use them to initiate dozens of contextual puzzles, such as sorting through keys to unlock a door, reassembling the shards of a pane of shattered stained glass, or arranging planks on a raft to make the holes in the wood match up with nails.

These puzzles make sense, but can be extremely challenging. Luckily, the skip button from the first game returns: Struggle for more than a couple of minutes and you can pass the puzzle by—though, unfortunately, without being shown the solution. Be aware, too, that your total game time—essentially your score—will suffer a 30 minute penalty for each puzzle skipped.