It crashed a few times on my Win 10 system. When playing, some items mislabled. example a golf club is actually a hokey stick. Also the needed colour notes to the piano disappear and you need to then guess as they are washed out in the notebook, so mark them down when they first appear or spend an hour trying to guess.

Finished the game though. So was able to play to the end. Read my comment to the first poster if you wish to avoid one of the game crashes and reach the very end.

Hi,
Thanks for all the hard work here, I'm thankfull you are doing this every week.
But I have a problem with yesterdays gamegiveaway; mother's diary.
Some where in the game, I have to oil a knights helmet. And now for the second time the game freezes. I have to ctrl-alt-del to get out of it.
I can't get past it.
Someone a solution for me?
Have a nice day!

Seemed like a good game as far as I got with it, but I could not get it to SAVE!! Uninstalled!!!

It'd be nice to know this is a HOG without having to hunt thru the Comments. Just saying

Oops, my comment doesn''t seem to have been posted, so trying again:
Was happy to see another HOG, albeit a kinda "junior" one. But noticed in the comments from a few years ago here that folks were having an issue with the game not allowing them to continue after a certain point. Although White Rabbit did say he was trying to email one poster a fix, I don't see any fix actually posted there, and am hesitant to install this and start playing if I'm going to be thwarted from finishing! Any thoughts?

Been craving a HOG, so even though this sounds a bit outdated, I do want to give it a try. However, I see in the comments from last time it was offered that there appeared to be a problem with one part of the game not working, preventing folks from continuing. I see that White Rabbit kindly offered to email one of the folks the fix, but I don't see it actually posted in that thread, and am hesitant to install something only to be thwarted mid-game! Any thoughts?

i didn't remember playing this or writing comments about it. turns out i did play it when it was offered in 2017 but didn't post my comments. they're below. thanks to myplaycity and the ggotd team for making this possible. as always, whiterabbit, my deepest gratitude for all you do!

best wishes to everyone out there. please stay safe and well,

tinyearl

Secrets of the Past: Mother's Diary

[star ratings on scale of 1-5:]
fun 4
visual/sound 4
challenge 4
storyline 4
overall 4

in this game you are an orphan trying to find out what happened to your natural mother.

the game was pretty fun. i kind of predicted how the story line was going to pan out.

the scenes are beautiful. they are a little dark, making it hard to see the hidden objects. the display did not stretch to fill my screen, but had a large black border all around. weirdly, this would not have bothered me at all on my netbook, but it did on this machine's larger display. the extreme randomness of items in the hidden object scenes bothered me a bit. a satellite? an actual satellite?? i know the point is to have a whole lot of random junk, but sometimes developers try to stick to objects that are appropriate to the theme and era.

i liked the music. it was peaceful and appropriate to the style of the game. i think there were two songs that cycled with periods silence in between. one of them ended abruptly rather than fading out. i really liked the ambient sounds, like the birds and frogs, and would even have enjoyed playing with just those sounds and no music.

the level of challenge was ok. it was easier than other games that i've played. for example, sometimes when you need to find several objects to complete a task, all of them are together and treated as a single object, so you don't have a lot of hunting to do.

the storyline was pretty predictable. i was surprised that areas that i had completed did not become inaccessible. the game's progress was mostly linear, so previous areas could have been disabled. it was a fairly small world, though, so maybe keeping everything available prevents it from feeling claustrophobic.

i found the active areas hard to work with. trying to use the navigation to go back (moving the cursor toward the bottom of the screen) often pulled up the inventory instead. active areas for items were smaller than i think they should have been. i had to run the game as administrator to get it to launch. it crashed once, when i looked at an illustration of a flower with crystals on it, but it had saved all of my progress, so i didn't lose anything. there was one pretty egregious error in the hidden objects: a scuba tank is identified as "balloon." it took forever to figure that out.

overall, it was a fun game. it seemed a little shorter than similar HOGs i've played; i finished it in a few evening sessions.

(System info: Win7 Pro 64-bit, 32GB RAM, i7-6700HQ, GTX 970M, 1920 x 1080 resolution)

I recommend this game!

I remember this game now that I've installed it. It did not work correctly on my Windows 7 and it's even worse on my Windows 8.1. I am in the menu and click to change player name. The game locks up and won't accept any commands. I have to use task manager to get out.
I will try again later to change it to windowed mode and change compatibility mode.

Game crashes shortly after the letter is shown in the intro.
In compatibility mode, the game crashes in the same place.
I use Windows 10 Home 64bit.

This game was offered before back in 2017.
Is this another one of those tedious "hidden objects" games where you have to find all of the hidden objects in a picture?
These are not games for the adult human but is only good for immature minds that need development through visual recognition.
Why can't you find a game with great graphics, plays quickly and something where I don't have to build a city from scratch?

Came "forgets" windowed setting - always opens full-screen. Tried changing setting after creating player profile, after playing the game and with different compatibility settings.

This game has been given away once before on October 22, 2017. Read the comments here:
https://game.giveawayoftheday.com/secrets-of-the-past-mother-s-diary/