Natural Threat: Ominous Shores

In Brief

A Botanical/entomologically oriented hidden object game

Installation:

Natural Threat: Ominous Shores downloads to a 611 MB zip file that unzips to three files, (a setup.gcd security wrapper, the set-up file and a read me). Those with multiple hard drives can save games on any drive they wish. The newly installed game is 634 MB in size. The game installs to the following path by default, but can be changed by the user if you prefer:

C:\Program Files (x86)\MyPlayCity.com\Natural Threat - Ominous Shores

Four shortcuts are installed to the desktop. three of which can be safely deleted (Play Online Games, MyPlayCity Games and shortcuts to a free online game which vary each week). Also, if you don't like icons installed to the quick launch task bar, make sure you uncheck the box when the additional tasks window appears (after the Select Start Menu Folder window)

Introduction:

Use your powers of observation to save your friends from the genetic aberrations that populate a forgotten island in Natural Threat: Ominous Shores! Brave the escalating threat that unfolds before you and save your companions! Each scene will bring new challenges, horrifying discoveries, and clues to what brought the monsters that populate the island to life. Be smart, and you might survive long enough to make the most shocking discovery of all in Natural Threat: ominous Shores!

Edited reference accessed HERE. 3rd Nov 2018

The Game:

Review 2:

Natural Threat: Ominous Shores is an unusual title, thanks mostly to its unusual “mad scientist” theme. I know what you’re thinking; we’ve seen mad scientists in hidden object games before. Well sure we have—but not generally intending to do humanity good, and not in a botanical setting. The unique approach employed by Ominous Shores not only works the way good sci-fi and horror fiction does, (by tapping into some of our basest fears), it also makes for some good entertainment.

The strangest thing about Ominous Shores is its weird hero swapping. I started the game as a young lab assistant working for a brilliant botanist/genetic scientist. I really enjoyed the role, having never gotten to play it before. Just as I was getting into it, however, the context abruptly shifted and I was swept through time and space and stuffed into the consciousness of a different protagonist, a young day-tripper out sailing with a group of friends. While other games have swapped heroes on me before, they’ve never done it in quite this way, and I found the process disorienting and slightly off-putting.

Shortly after becoming the carefree day-tripper, I was shipwrecked on the very same tropical island on which I’d worked (as my other self) as a lab assistant. Dragging myself onto the beach, I realized my friends were gone. Every last one of them, the useless jerks. I began exploring the island on my own and found the overgrown remains of my old botanical lab. No wait—that wasn’t me! I’m not a lab assistant, I’m a shipwreck survivor! OK, so I um, found the remains of a lab I’d never, ever seen before, and was in the middle of cursing my shiftless buddies when I saw one of them being dragged off by a gigantic plant and realized something was amiss. Yeah, I’m quick that way.

I began digging through the ruins in earnest then, collecting journal entries from a Dr. Steiner, a crackpot who believed the future of mankind depended on splicing human genes with those of plants and animals. The good doctor was nowhere to be found, but the more work of his I discovered, the more I realized the danger I—we—were in. From that point on, I was determined to find my friends and get the heck off that island.

Natural Threat: Ominous Shores does a lot of things well. As you might have guessed, the story did a good job of sucking me in. A big part of that was the amount of attention paid to sprinkling the environments with interesting descriptive text and cool things to look at. The game’s flora-filled graphics were truly impressive; in fact, I’d say developer Butterfly iSoft did the creepy plant thing so thoroughly and so well, that they wanted nothing less than to create their very own Little Shop of Horrors.

Of course a beautiful facade means nothing if the gameplay stinks, but Ominous Shores scores highly in that regard as well. The game was one of the more complex hidden object games I’ve played, with scenes and puzzles interwoven from beginning to end. Puzzles, for the most part, were of a middling difficulty and were more about finding things and putting things in their place than solving anything – but they were still fun to do. I particularly enjoyed an interesting mini-game take on mahjong and the end puzzle, which while a little click-heavy, was somewhat unexpected.

The one thing Ominous Shores could improve is its sound. While I really enjoyed the melancholy musical score (for some reason, it kept calling to mind themes from Showtime’s Dexter), it came and went in a strange way. There seemed little rhyme or reason to when the music would kick in or when it would stop, and that often marred the mood for me. Fortunately, the game’s surprising number of storytelling cutscenes made up for it. Now if only there’d been a little voiceover…

Natural Threat: Ominous Shores does what I never thought possible; puts plants at the center of a mystery and makes it interesting. (Stop grinding your teeth, plant lovers. It’s not good for your enamel.) Although the idea of changing heroes mid-stream is a little odd, and the music cues could use some work, Ominous Shores is still without question, a fun, beautiful and immersive hidden object adventure.

Edited reference accessed HERE. Originally posted by Neilie Johnson Feb 29th 2012, reposted by Whiterabbit-uk 3rd Nov 2018

Review 2:

For the first half-hour, Natural Threat: Ominous Shores feels like it might be building towards something special. The game opens with the player taking on the role of a recently-hired assistant to a mad scientist determined to crossbreed animals with plants. As the player carefully removes insects from experimental plant beds and searches out the ingredients for a mutagenic cocktail, gamers will be hunting for objects in believably cluttered locations, giving the whole thing a natural feel. Then the scientist's experiments prove successful to a tragic degree, and the plot jumps forwards a few decades, where a more generic story and less impressive gameplay are waiting

As I wrote above, the game's opening is impressive in this respect, with a single object-hunt screen managing to look like storage area of a man with more important things to worry about than the orderly arrangement of his tchotkes. Once the time-jump is complete, and the player is now controlling a generic youth whose party-boat sank near the island, the screens get needlessly messy. If the mere appearance of incongruous items like suits of armor and cuckoo clocks on this isolated Caribbean research outpost wasn't bad enough, the game commits the cardinal sin of HOGs—arbitrarily changing the scale of items to better hide them in stages. It's all well and good to tell me I'm looking for a "dog" and then trick me but putting a small drawing off in the corner, but making a hex nut the size of a human head in order to conceal it is just unfair.

It's pretty much a fifty-fifty split in this game. While there are plenty of screens that ask the player to collect over a dozen random objects, there are also a few progressive item hunt areas, where every item in the list has a specific purpose and relevance to the puzzle being solved. These puzzles are well-enough designed that it winds up throwing the standard screens into sharp relief, making them seem more perfunctory than anything else.

It's in this area that the game really falls apart. While HOG fans have come to accept the "find a key to open the chest—and fourteen other nonsense items for no reason!" puzzle framework as a necessary evil of the genre, Natural Threat feels perfunctory even by those lax expectations. It isn't just how many times players will be asked to go back and hunt for objects on the same screen—although that does get tiresome—it's how little effort the developers put into integrating the searches into the story. There are many occasions in the game where I came across a glowing field letting me know that a HOG screen is available—but the plot hadn't presented me with an impassable obstacle or a mystery to be solved. Not only was I faced with the prospect of picking twelve objects out of a pile of refuse, I didn't even know which of the dozen was the plot-related item that I was supposed to be looking for. That's just sloppy design.

Natural Threat's visuals are attractive enough, and nearly half of the puzzles are well-designed for the genre, but it never gives the player a good reason to keep playing. The central mystery of the island is kind of a dud, and the main character and their friends are such ciphers that it's not really possible to care if they get off the island, except in an objective, "getting-eaten-by-carnivorous-plants-is-a-bad-outcome" sort of way. Without technical accomplishment or a compelling narrative, Natural Threat never rises above the crowd to distinguish itself in any meaningful way. There are better ways to spend time hunting pixels.

Edited reference accessed HERE. Originally posted by Daniel Weissenberger on October 22, 2012 Reposted by Whiterabbit-uk 3rd Nov 2018

Other Reviews and Videos of Natural Threat: Ominous Shores:

You can see other comments of Natural Threat: Ominous ShoresHERE and HERE

You can see several in-game videos of game play HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE & HERE and a written walkthrough HERE.

Suggestions:

After you've had an opportunity to play today's giveaway please take a few moments to give some positive or negative feedback; for example, what you liked or disliked about the game, or how it could be improved. If you don't like the genre at all, please explain why and if any, what improvements would change your mind? If you don't have time to post a comment today, please do so at your convenience, thank you. If you wish to post a review or comment about the game later, you can access the comments section by going to the game giveaways home page, then scroll to the bottom of the page where it says Archives and select the date the giveaway was live (giveaway days are in bold type). This will open up the appropriate page for you to post your comment or review. Alternatively, you can google the name of the game and include Gamegiveawayoftheday in the search. This should give you a list of links to whenever this game was given away.

If you miss today's game giveaway you can always get the game via MyPlayCity 24/7 HERE; or If you prefer to purchase the game you can get it HERE via Big Fish Games.

Problems getting the game to work:

If you're having problems installing or activating or getting Natural Threat: Ominous Shores to work please visit the FAQ's Thread HERE and read through the communities comments because sometimes fixes have already been posted, for example, a common issue seen since the Themida wrapper was introduced three years ago is that some community members installation of the game are blocked by their security because Themida code has been known to hide malware, (usually an error message is flagged for example 'The executable is corrupted' even though in reality it is not); so as a precaution some anti malware programs will block and even delete the suspect installation files even though the files (i.e. the setup, read me and setup.gcd files are actually totally free from malware. This issue can be solved either by rebooting your computer in safe mode with networking or a quicker method is to temporarily turn off your security software to allow the installation. You could also try whitelisting the setup.gcd file. In the almost 11 years this game giveaway site has been operating there has 'never' been a game given away that was infected with malware.

If for any reason you want to contact the giveaway team, for example, you have a game to offer the community, or are unable to download the latest game or other issues that the FAQ's thread or these comments don't cover or solve you can do so HERE

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank MyPlayCity for giving away todays game and also to the game giveaway team, as always, for securing other ways to get free games.

Useful Information not related to today's game giveaway:

If Natural Threat: Ominous Shores doesn't interest you, but you still hanker for something new to play, you'll find details of some game deals whether they be sale items, indie bundles or games being given away for free HERE (I've not updated the thread in a while, but most of the links still take you to the latest deals).

The rest of the information that used to be posted in the game review can be found in the forums HERE. Finally, check out Delenns threads for details of other free games and offers HERE and elsewhere in the game discussion forums HERE, (usually on the first page of the game discussion forums).