Mirror lovers beware! In our Witch Hunters: Stolen Beauty review you'll see how this game hits a little close to home with a vengeful witch sucking the youth and beauty from a young girl. Can you, as the girl, track the witch to her boarding school lair, regain your beauty, and exact an appropriate punishment on the evil enchantress?
Witch Hunters: Stolen Beauty introduces possibly the two most creep worthy topics for women. That is, boarding school education and losing your good looks. Even the most practical and stalwart of women would feel the hairs rise on the back of her neck when thinking about turning into a dried up old crone and have her knuckles rapped with a ruler. Let’s not even get into the fact that the headmistress of the aforementioned academy just happens to be a witch.
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The game begins with a young girl, Angelica, questioning her grandmother about her school days. Sort of a ridiculous version of "Why do you never talk about…" Who would talk about this particular kind of brutal and demoralizing form of English private education? But, I digress.
Grandma Teresa explains that she left school because the headmistress, Madame Flemet, was a witch. Here's a newsflash for you. Most boarding school headmistresses are witches, but we generally refer to them using the "B" version of the word.
No sooner has dear old grandma made this confession and uttered the name Madame Flemet than the witch herself appears in all her glory, right there in the parlor. (Imagine if saying someone's name in real life automatically got them to appear. You'd find me babbling, "Hugh Jackman, Hugh Jackman, Hugh Jackman," repeatedly.)
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Back to the story. Apparently, Madame Flemet has been carrying a serious grudge against grandma in the intervening 70-some years since grandma was a student and wants to exact a little revenge. You, as the granddaughter, get between them. The witch turns her attention to you and decides to suck your youthful good looks out of you, leaving you as a wizened old hag. (Note to Angelica: This is what you get for interfering. Grandma had a nice long life. You should have let her duke it out with the evil enchantress on her own.)
You now must travel to the long closed boarding school in hopes of overpowering the witch and regaining your "Stolen Beauty."
Once actual game play began, the first thing I noticed was the music, which for a "game" isn’t necessarily a positive. We are talking loud, intense, distracting music.
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The graphics are sharp and detailed and the integrated strategy guide is a nice touch. However, the Hidden Object Areas and puzzles are straightforward enough to make the strategy guide superfluous.
I particularly enjoyed the mini-games on offer in Witch Hunters: Stolen Beauty. The puzzles necessitated a bit of brainpower, but were just challenging enough to be fun. I’m not a fan of the ones that require an engineering degree or, conversely, are so bleeding obvious my Pekingese pup could do them.
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As you wander about the school grounds, you’ll come across notes or diary pages purportedly written by former students (which considering their vintage should have disintegrated long ago) that move the storyline forward. Most of them involve the disappearance of female students who happened to get on the wrong side of Madame Flemet. However, in one scene where you infiltrate a former classroom, you discover an elderly "student" bemoaning a homework task…
So, did some people get killed, some lose their looks, and others just live perennially in calculus class? By the way, in helping this decrepit old student, she gifts you with one of several abilities you’ll earn — the gift to see through things.
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Speaking of notes, while indulging in bits of business in the kitchen, you come across what can only be on of Madame Flemet's "witch recipes" of the classic "eye of newt, wing of bat" variety. Somehow, I would think a witch sophisticated enough to suck out someone’s youth and beauty wouldn’t really need to resort to gathering toadstools and dragon sweat.
Witch Hunters: Stolen Beauty is creepy, good fun, especially for those of us who bid adieu to school days long, long ago and whose beauty got stolen by the simple passage of time rather than a conniving witch.
