The Secret Order 3: The Ancient Times Review

I’m a classic teenager—I like slicing up zombies, and shooting Soviet soldiers. I am not the typical audience for point-and-clicks. Much to my surprise, I ended up losing an entire evening to The Secret Order 3: Ancient Times, and I didn’t utterly hate it.

Anyone who has ever scoured the barrel of cheap games on Steam will be familiar with the work of publisher Artifex Mundi, who over the past couple of years have published almost 30 “hidden object adventure games”.

The Secret Order 3 saw near simultaneous release on Windows, Mac and mobile, but it’s clear which system it’s designed for. Chunky buttons make up the main menu, including a link to an Artifex Mundi store screen that lets you buy more games— it screams mobile game.

As someone with little experience with this kind of game, I can’t tell you if it looks better or worse than others. I can say that it blends 2D pre-rendered artwork with 3D objects and characters in an inoffensive manner, with interactable elements having a subtle depth that pops them out from the background just enough to make them difficult to spot at first but then detectable under closer inspection.

Characters will converse with you at points throughout the story, and each is rendered in 3D and voice acted. It’s a shame then that the only feature that is clearly animated is the mouth—the lips move while the rest of the face stays perfectly still, which is an unnatural and frankly jarring sight. Thankfully, these encounters are usually limited to only a couple of lines, keeping the pace of the puzzle solving and adventuring fast.

It helps too that transitioning between areas is snappy. There are three main areas in The Secret Order 3, the last of which being about 4x the size of the others. You travel through different screens via linear or branching paths, and the puzzles often have you backtracking, but there’s no need for concern. Opening up the map lets you zip to any location in an instant, allowing you to move from puzzle to puzzle as you find the parts you need for solutions.

The puzzles themselves are never too taxing, which is an achievement when nearly every puzzle introduces a new minigame. There was nothing here I hadn’t seen before: you have your pipe puzzles, colour matching, jigsaws, and a whole bunch more. They often link into one another with completing one leading to the solution of another, giving me an almost “fetch quest” feeling, but without the agony that usually entails.

Marketed as the Collector’s Edition, The Secret Order 3 also comes with a bonus chapter set after the conclusion of the story, introducing new characters, environments, and puzzles. Clocking in at about 45 minutes long, there’s plenty of content in there to match the few hours that the main game offers. Also included is a selection of wallpapers, concept art, and the soundtrack.

The Secret Order 3: Ancient Times is a pleasant journey that will briefly entertain. At a budget price, it’s an ideal alternative to all the huge mainstream releases this month. Despite being the third in the series, it’s really quite a standalone story, and works as a great introduction to the genre.