Paper Bride is a Chinese horror mystery puzzle game. You will play as the groom to search for the truth and have bizarre encounters, gradually learning about the dark mystic custom in the bride's home village and a story from the past...
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The first point-and-click mobile game I’ve picked up, Paper Bride is a Chinese horror-puzzle title with five distinct acts. The main premise is that it’s your wedding day when suddenly things go awry. Your wife-to-be suddenly disappears and you are soon stalked by a woman in white identical to her, along with paper people that look lifelike. Your job is to figure out what’s going on by examining your bride’s mysterious family history and to save her from the malevolent powers afoot. First things first, for being a translation the game’s dialogue is respectably clear. There’s some spotty grammar here and there, yet on the whole it’s coherent in its narrative and never felt superfluous in its exposition. Which is thankful, as good luck finding a summary of the game online. The story was even a little sweet once you got the whole picture of the situation.
In terms of the ratio of intuitive to confounding, I’d say Paper Bride sits comfortably in the 3:1 ratio on that front. Most of the traditional puzzles like lock combinations and clock configurations were run-of-the-mill and quaint. The latter ratio figure mostly consisted of some semi-complex crafting tasks, some of which had some very specific orderings. Unsurprisingly and not unwelcomely, this free-to-play puzzle game has a token system to give hints or to outright skip sections. I never skipped sections but I did employ the hints system at least a handful of times. Granted you can always use the tried and true method of randomly clicking on the screen, but be careful because the game will occasionally ding you for pressing on a random spot every now and then. And if you do that more than 5 times you’ll need to purchase or earn more “energy”.
This is the only part of the game I would call downright predatory, as it pretty much forces you to watch an ad or purchase tokens to continue at some point. Whatever, I was fine with spending a dollar or two to make sure I wasn’t too inundated with ads. Still, I will say the random ad breaks during the later chapters of the game started to border on annoying, but If you can muster up a chunk of patience, Paper Brides is a reasonable choice of vice for a few hours, replete with some creepy ambient chimes to give you that nice oxymoronic feeling of cozy dread. Plus I can’t say I didn’t learn a thing or two about Taoism from its story.
In terms of the ratio of intuitive to confounding, I’d say Paper Bride sits comfortably in the 3:1 ratio on that front. Most of the traditional puzzles like lock combinations and clock configurations were run-of-the-mill and quaint. The latter ratio figure mostly consisted of some semi-complex crafting tasks, some of which had some very specific orderings. Unsurprisingly and not unwelcomely, this free-to-play puzzle game has a token system to give hints or to outright skip sections. I never skipped sections but I did employ the hints system at least a handful of times. Granted you can always use the tried and true method of randomly clicking on the screen, but be careful because the game will occasionally ding you for pressing on a random spot every now and then. And if you do that more than 5 times you’ll need to purchase or earn more “energy”.
This is the only part of the game I would call downright predatory, as it pretty much forces you to watch an ad or purchase tokens to continue at some point. Whatever, I was fine with spending a dollar or two to make sure I wasn’t too inundated with ads. Still, I will say the random ad breaks during the later chapters of the game started to border on annoying, but If you can muster up a chunk of patience, Paper Brides is a reasonable choice of vice for a few hours, replete with some creepy ambient chimes to give you that nice oxymoronic feeling of cozy dread. Plus I can’t say I didn’t learn a thing or two about Taoism from its story.