Uncover Ancient Secrets
Understanding history is a lot like trying to solve a puzzle. The events serve as pieces that hold fractured bits of the bigger picture. Only after solving how they connect do we get an understanding of the mysteries they hold. This dynamic is what makes Sand-An Adventure Story such a satisfying game.
Sand-An Adventure Story is an indie puzzle/adventure game from developer Pixlab told through the visuals of a graphic novel. Set in the Summer of 1927, Sand follows the British archeologist, Leo Parker. While wrapping up a dig in Giza on behalf of the Crown, workers discover a tomb connected to the Pharaoh Anat. Leo decides to stay and begin an investigation into the Pharaoh’s life and treasure. Unbeknownst to Leo, he’s more connected to the ancient royal than he ever thought.
Mysterious Mastaba
The game begins in front of the newly discovered tomb. Players must tap objects and the environment, which triggers narrative dialogue from Leo. The tomb’s door holds the first puzzle—a lock with a circular dial with four levels of rotating wheels. Each wheel has a set of markings. Like with most of the game’s puzzles, players must intuit how to go about solving the puzzle. If you get stumped, there is a hint button in the lower left corner of the screen. Most of the time the hints provided helpful nudges. However, some were a little too vague. The puzzles also have an easy mode, which players can trigger by tapping the wheel-like button next to the hint button. The two times that I used this aid, the difficulty changed drastically, allowing me to solve the puzzle almost instantly.
After solving the lock on the door, players explore the temple, interacting with objects and collecting map pieces hidden about the tomb. One of the rooms is blocked by yet another door with another dial puzzle. This time, the puzzle is much simpler. The dial contains pieces of various colored tiles in a rotating wheel and slots in the wall to house them. After solving, the player reaches a room with Anat’s treasure box, and must solve the final introductory puzzle to unlock it from its pedestal. With the box and map pieces in hand, Leo hops on a truck headed back to his base camp in the desert. The archeologist’s tent is probably what you’d imagine. There’s a desk with papers scattered, the recently recovered treasure box, a cot, and a Victrola. At this point, players will be prompted to pay for the game to continue.
A Trove of Puzzles
At $1.99, the introductory portion of the game seemed promising enough to warrant the price of the full paid game, and boy, was I right. The puzzles in Sand are some of the most fun and well-designed that I’ve played in a while. Sand also boasts some of the best variety in terms of difficulty and style of puzzles that I’ve seen from a mobile game. One minute I would have to concoct the right formula for an antidote and the next sort through lock picks. The latter doesn’t sound fun, but for puzzle game aficionados, trust me; you’ll enjoy that particular challenge.
One of the hardest puzzles was the coin problem presented by one of the vendors in the open market. There are four bowls displaying totals and an assortment of coins. Players must determine the denomination and sort them correctly based off four equations featuring the coins. After an hour of failing to find the solution, I employed the easy mode for the first of two times. The hint stated to put the correct coins in the correct bowl. That much, I could discern. Easy mode gave me all of the coins’ values. A singular coin value reveal as a hint would have helped me solve it.
The other difficult puzzle in which I used easy mode suffered from the same vague hint issue. The hint told me to sort the blocks with symbols in the correct order. Easy mode revealed the symbols to be numbers and only had me swap a couple. The easy mode took away too much of the difficulty, and with it, the reward of having solved the puzzle. However, it’s obvious that the developer took great care with balancing the difficulty and hints for most of the puzzles.
Legends of the Hidden Temple
Sands not only shines with its puzzles but also with its graphic novel style and storytelling. Leo’s journey feels graphically and narratively as if it came straight from one of the big comic book publishers. Additionally, the graphic novel style serves to compliment the story. Because of this stylistic choice, the story and puzzle-solving worked as a one-two-punch that kept me continuously interested and engaged with the game. My only criticism of the story was that I wanted more. That’s also high praise, as it means that I was invested in Leo’s journey. The game is a bit short, clocking in at a few hours, but feels appropriate given the price point. Sand would also benefit from cutscenes or voice work, at minimum. That said, the game works beautifully as a finished project.
Sand-An Adventure Story is one of the best mobile puzzle games that I’ve played in a while. The game features a stunning art style, with a well-crafted story that suits the hybrid puzzle and adventure genre perfectly. Despite a few hiccups with the hint mechanic and the occasional oversimplification of puzzles in easy mode, Sand offers players a trove of interesting puzzles to solve.
