Joan Jade and the Gates of Xibalba :

In Brief:
Joan Jade and the Gates of Xibalba was originally given away on April 16, 2017! where it received a positive 89% from 38 votes with 37 comments which you can read HERE.

You can see community reviews of Joan Jade and the Gates of Xibalba HERE and more information in the Big Fish forums HERE. You can also see a written walkthrough of the game HERE as well as some videos of game play HERE, HERE, HERE and HERE (Polish).

You can also see a gallery of almost 60 images of the early stages of the game HERE; (there are duplicate images, so just over 40 original ones)

Introduction:
Explore secret locations with Joan Jade in the amazing game Joan Jade And The Gates Of Xibalba! Are you a true daredevil able to think clearly even in the unexpected situations? Lots of obstacles are waiting for you and if you don’t step back, you’ll be able to save the children. A great reason to fight till the last, isn’t it? Joan Jade needs your help! She won’t be able to find her children alone! In the game Joan Jade And The Gates Of Xibalba you dive into the mysterious whirlpool of ravishing adventures, so get ready to lots of surprises! You’ll visit in the remote corners of the world, only a few of explorers can boast that they have been there, others will lie you. So, let’s start! Joan Jade is a famous archaeologist, who took part in lots of expeditions but recently she decided to finish her career as an explorer and study the new area – cooking.

Now she is a happy mother and it’s very important to take care of children. But her rivals who are not so successful are at all pains to get all the maps with secret routes and they have kidnapped Joan’s children to obtain this information. Join Joan to teach the enemies a good lesson! All the traces are going to the mysterious Xibalba, an extremely dangerous place. Start the expedition right now! Guide Joan in the stunning locations and do your best to cope with the hidden object scenes and brain training mini-games. It’s high time for training both your attention and quick sightedness, there is a list of hidden objects in front of you: find all the items to go to the next locations and reveal the criminals. Explore the dangerous jungles, complete all the mini-games there and go to the ruins of an ancient Mayan tribe in the game Joan Jade And The Gates Of Xibalba! Enjoy the amazing graphics and the intriguing storyline, Joan is relying on you. Lots of precious trophies await you, help Joan cope with difficult tasks and find her children in mysterious Xibalba!

The original reference I used from from MyPlayCity (April 16th 2017) no longer exists as the game was removed from their library.

The Game:
The story opens with Joan rushing to the Yucatan to search for her children, Jim and Emily, who were volunteering at an excavation site but went missing during a storm. Frustrated by how slowly the local police force is taking to get a search party together, Joan – who’s no stranger to exploring – sets out to find her kids herself and ends up investigating a strange old temple nestled deep within the jungle.

Joan Jade combines elements of hidden object and adventure gameplay. You’ll spend most of your time picking up anything that looks important and adding it to your inventory, then figuring out how to use these items on your surroundings in order to gain access to the next area. One of the first things you’ll do, for example, is search base camp to find something to clear vegetation and a light source. You’ll also occasionally be able to zoom in on certain areas and enter a close-up hidden object search where you’ll search for random objects like a vase, hammer, arrowhead, or gloves.

Some areas are larger than one room, and you can move from one scene to the next by clicking on arrows that mark each exit. If you get stumped and need a clue about what to do next, you can click on a compass to receive a hint. The compass takes a minute to recharge.

Joan Jade and the Gates of Xibalba makes a good first impression, with bright cartoonish graphics reminiscent of the Samantha Swift series, well-designed scenes, not-horrible writing, and a handful of interesting – if not groundbreakingly original – mini-games, like sliding block, pipe fitting, spot-the-difference and memory matching puzzles. I enjoyed the way you were allowed to skip a mini-game after a certain amount of time had passed but would suffer the consequence of not being able to earn a trophy for beating it. (Ample incentive to stick around and try to figure the mini-game out rather than rush past it.)

The game starts to lose a bit of steam half way through its 3-4 hour playthrough time, though, as the temple interiors start to look similar to every other Mayan, Aztec or Incan-themed hidden object game you’ve ever played, and the mini-games start to repeat themselves. If I’m going to be asked to spot miniscule differences on fish, for example, the game could at least swap in different-looking fish for the second, third and fourth time around, or maybe even come up with some different animals altogether. The ending is abrupt and rather unsatisfying as well.

Joan Jade and the Gates of Xibalba is a pretty package and not a bad hidden object adventure, but ultimately comes up a little short on depth and staying power.


Edited reference accessed HERE. Original review written by Erin Bell on 29th Jan 2010. Edited by Whiterabbit-uk 16th April 2017

The original host I uploaded images to no longer exists and the slide show of almost 90 images that was posted HERE that I uploaded to Photobucket are now locked because since posting them, they have reduced the amount of space you can use for free significantly. I have tens of thousands of game images from well over a thousand games and mods for various games that I am no longer able to access unless I pay a subscription for five different accounts, which would be a small fortune that I cannot justify at this point in time.

Notes on Security
I scanned a zipped copy of the installed game and it found 3 hits (Bit Defender Theta, VBA32 & Jiangmin) from 60 antimalware engines. The downloaded executable may include some low level adware that only opens your browser to TooMKy's home page after the game has installed, The installation does not inject any malware into your system. When your browser is opened to TooMky's home page when the game has been installed, it earns TooMky games some money, part of which is given to the developer of the game for allowing the game to be given away free. The results of the scan which you can see via the link below are probably picking up the low level no invasive adware and in my opinion are false positives:

https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/32cbda88e313c5dc0ea74312435bfa10475b73ea9cae75237b04fd911471269c/detection

Other Free Games:
The latest games from Epic Games include Horizon Chase Turbo and Sonic Mania and will be available to add to your EPIC games library until Thursday 1st July at 4pm UK time/11am EST when a new set of games will be available to add to your account. Since Epic Games started to give away games I've accumulated over 270 games not counting duplicates, most of which are either AAA or high end indie arcade games.

Also from Epic, If you play online with friends there's a decent PvE/PvP free FPS game called Scavengers with a coop mode (I checked it out recently and it looks fantastic as well as plays well) and you can still get the clicker RPG Idle Champions as well as other multiplayer games. I've been posting redeemable codes for free chests that contain various buffs and other items for Idle Champions (time limited for 5 to 7 days from the day of posting) over in the forums HERE. They contain various items that boost your heroes abilities and health as well as affect your group of heroes in game, for example potions that boost health or DPS, contracts that can improve armour or weapons already used by the heroes or other contracts that add specific amounts of gold to your bank as well as items of jewellery, armour or weapons that buff your characters stats. I don't usually play clicker type games, but this one is well supported by the developer and has a massive following. I'll be posting codes for as long as I continue to play the game. I've posted some help sheets and links to a game wiki via the above link as well

Please see Delenn's threads for Steam and Non Steam freebies HERE and HERE respectively. Delenn has been updating these regularly for years now. It’s worth adding these links to your favourites and checking regularly for available freebies. Most are only free for a specific time. If you miss the deadline you’ll miss out. Once added to your account, it’s yours to keep. Delenn has recently posted details of more Steam games that are temporarily free. One may be until it leaves early access??? - i.e. Tower Ball - Incremental Tower Défense plus a reflex game called Keyboard Killers are still free. Delenn posted details of a free origin came called Battlefield 4 which is available for free if you have an Amazon Prime account (If you like FPS games, it's a brilliant game to own. (not sure if it's still live).


You'll find hundreds of freeware games of all arcade and indie genres on Itch.io and Caimans Games as well as other sources. Please do check out the game discussion forums for older posts HERE (the sticky section is useful). Many of the earlier posts may be out of date with respect to the links I and others have provided to the free games; however, you only need to know the name of the game to find most of them via other sources. Many of those games from 2008 to around 2017 were posted as part of a project to supplement the lack of weekday games when the game giveaway went to weekend only games around Easter 2008 (mainly instigated due to the financial crisis of 2008) until November 2018 when Falcoware stepped into the weekday slot; however, from around 2015 onwards we did start to get the occasional Steam key for various games offered as limited giveaways, with a restriction on the number of keys available (anywhere from 25 to 2000+). These included over 60 decent AAA games and indie arcade games ; for example some of the better AAA games included , lucky Warhammer: Vermintide 1 & 2 plus DLC for version 2; Dreadlands, Mount & Blade: Warband, Immortal Unchained and Conan Exiles.


The Indie Gala developers freebies are available HERE (latest additions) and HERE (81 games in the Showcase, most full versions). Recent additions include In Between Land Sonya: The Great Adventure, The Last Dream: Developer's Edition, Deep Despair Cube Runner, Agatha Christie - The ABC Murders, Whispering Willows Snow White Solitaire. Charmed Kingdom, Adam Wolfe (Complete Edition), Doodle Devil Deep Space Anomaly ; plus, many more in the showcase section HERE and the Freebies section HERE.

It’s worth adding these links to your favourites and checking regularly for available freebies. Most are only free for a specific time. If you miss the deadline you’ll miss out. Once added to your account, they are yours to keep. :)