We were advised to take my daughter to the A & E department of our local hospital via the UK's Medical Emergency telephone number (111) around midnight last night and only got home just after 9am this morning. Thankfully my daughter just required some antibiotics and is okay. Thank you to all who have passed on well wished for my daughter; appreciated.

Mermaid Adventures: The Frozen Time:

In Brief:
I've managed to grab several moments playing Mermaid Adventures; (the last time this was given way I had problems running it, but this time it worked perfectly). It's a combination of match three HOG, memory and jigsaw puzzles. From the short time I've played this it's definitely one I'll be keeping. It has a times and untimed mode. The timed mode gives you achievements and level awards. The levels are reasonably challenging and entertaining, though the simpler jigsaws are ideal for children.


The game was originally given away HERE, on the 12th January 2019 where it received a positive 84% from 32 votes with 29 comments. It's the sequel to the match three game Mermaid Adventures: The Magic Pearl that we received December 16th 2018.


You can see Steam community reviews of todays game HERE - (Most are short positive reviews and most are not in English. The main negative review gives you a good flavour of the game). Also, checkout a few videos of game play HERE, HERE and HERE.

You can get the game via Steam with 60% off at the moment HERE costing only £1.91p; (or both versions for 51% off , costing £4.69.

Introduction:
Once again, the underwater kingdom is in turmoil, thanks to the mischievous machinations of the evil octopus! The octopus and his servants have begun playing cruel tricks on the inhabitants of the undersea world, leaving a trail of frustration and strife in their wake. Now it is up to the brave mermaid, Alice and her equally courageous friends to restore order and happiness to the ocean! First she'll need to wake her friends from their slumber and enlist the aid of the wise sorceress, Turtle to assist them in their quest. Help Alice and her friends bring peace and sanity back to the underwater kingdom in this gorgeous Match-3 adventure!

Features:
80 unique levels
Pleasant, cartoon like graphics suited to children (and adults)
Story included
Pleasant Music
Four types of puzzles i.e. match3, hidden objects, puzzle & memory levels.

Edited reference and features accessed HERE; 21st August 2021

The Game:
Despite the main review posted on Steam gave this a thumbs down, they still played it for almost seven hours and posted an excellent although negative review. Personally I disagree with it being a thumbs down, especially considering today it's totally free and with disabled adware from MyPlayCity, apart from when you initially install it when your browser is opened to MPC's home page and when you close the game down.; plus I though most of the negative aspects of the review were a little pernickety. As it's late in the day and I've only just woke up from a worrying night, I'm going to repost Lilly's review from Steam despite it's overall negativity as it does cover all aspects of the game and is well writte.

Personally I think most of the negative points made by lilly are rather weak; I had no issues with the game whatsoever. Maybe creating links between tiles was sometimes a little hit and miss, but that was because trying to navigate around loads of bunched up tiles meant it was easy to move over to a similar tile and lose the track you'd created, but this was easily rectified by being a little more careful when navigating blocks of the same tiles (see image below for an example of loads of the same tiles being linked, with lots of twists and turns). Also, I had no issues with the jigsaw puzzles, though I had no reason to replace a piece in the conveyor belt. Because the image of the jigsaw was left in the background was decolourised, it was relatively easy to place each piece with a little though.

Review posted by Lilly 1st March 2018:
Mermaid Adventures: The Frozen Time's core idea is having an enjoyable mix of various casual mini-games, wrapped in a comic-style story. However, as soon as one starts playing, it becomes obvious that despite the good intentions, the implementation is very messy and at times even dreadful.

The story is decent and nicely presented. The undersea world has been bewitched by an evil octopus and its servants; the only one who can break this spell is the mermaid Alice, who remained unaffected by this charm; she now needs help in gathering magical clock parts, scattered throughout the game. Every 10 levels there's a comic panel, unravelling a new page of the story - these are beautifully drawn, colourful and very enjoyable.

On the other hand, the levels are very buggy and poorly designed. Throughout the game, one can encounter four type of puzzles:

Chain match:
This is the most common level type of the game, covering around 70% of the levels, in which the player needs to create chains of the same elements - the longer the chain, the bigger the score. The common elements from match-3 games are also present: ice tiles that break when a match is created around them, chained titles that need to be caught in a match so that one chain is destroyed etc.

On top of that, most of the levels feature a new mechanic - there is a little red crab that has to be moved towards one part of the level in order to pick up a key, then moved to the opposite part of the level so that a chest is opened with that key. Nice idea, but horrible mechanics. Most of the times the crab doesn't even want to move - its movement is very chaotic: when you think it won't move, it moves; when you bet it will move, it just sits there like a stone. The whole thing is extremely frustrating and doesn't seem to follow any kind of logic. I spent hours trying to find a ruleset for the crab movement, there have been discussions in the forums about that but it's just not possible to come up with one. No ruleset can be applied because in reality it glitches like crazy and the result of it is that the player gets extremely frustrated and angry (for a good reason). The developers are at the moment unwilling to change it (or rather: fix it) and claim that the mechanics are designed to be like that in order to prove a challenge. But why would anyone want to be challenged in this awful way when their reason to play this game is to have a nice and casual experience?

In addition to this there are other bugs: tiles appear outside of the grid (and are match-able like this), the refill of the board after a match is created is also rather chaotic (as are most match three boards when they refill).

Jigsaw puzzle:
The target of these levels is to assemble a picture from multiple interlocking pieces. Only a few tiles are visible at a time, and a new piece is added to the list when one is picked up. Putting one back in the list is a complete mess, it hides under the existing tiles and it's hard to reach again - therefore the only solution is to put it on the canvas and let it sit there (or find its right place on it). Luckily, the grid is rather small, therefore usually there won't be many pieces covering the picture and since the tiles are rather big, it's quite easy to solve a level in just a couple of minutes.

:
In these levels, the objects seemed to be glued to the background and they are extremely small. On top of that, they're usually hidden behind the décor (plants or other things) and a lot of them are basely visible (only a part of the object is visible and it's very hard to distinguish what kind of object that is). For near-sighted people, solving these levels will be a tough chore and kids will probably not have enough patience to look at every pixel. Spam-clicking is also sanctioned with a decrease in the allocated time.

Memory-match:
In these levels, one needs to find pairs of matching objects that are hidden inside some clams. Interesting is the fact that after one match has been done, the clams don't disappear, therefore one would have to keep in mind not only the location of the objects, but also which of them are paired already. Sadly, not even these levels are bug-free: given 4 objects that are the same, there is a specific match of 2 and 2 (one can't match them however they want, despite them being identical).

Original review posted by Steam community member Lilly HERE, 1st March 2018. Reposted with edit by Whiterabbit-uk 21st August 2021.

Notes on Security:

I scanned a zipped copy of the installed game and it found zero hits from 60 antimalware engines. The downloaded executable may include some low level adware that only opens your browser to Falcoware's home page after the game has installed and places four shortcuts onto your desktop (which can be safely deleted once the game has installed). The installation does not inject any malware into your system. When your browser is opened to Falcoware's home page when the game has been installed, it earns Falcoware games some money, part of which is given to the developer of the game for allowing the game to be given away free. You can see the results of the scan via the following link:

https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/1a95b4648e9140f8bb0f52aa302405b3096e42bc7204d38a58b03c39bfd01f93/detection