Buy Fall of the New Age Premium Edition

A short and nice casual point-and-click adventure, with a few innovative thievery features: lock-picking, dressing up in costumes, and using slingshots. Unfortunately, these features are all very casual indeed: dressing up especially involves no real gameplay. Expect an especially casual experience.

There are a handful of hidden-object scenes, too, but it's really not a hidden-object game.

The animations are good, but the voice acting is very bad--perhaps due to the actors struggling with an awkward English script). Still, everything comes together to move the story along well enough.

Nothing amazing here, but it's pleasant enough for a thumbs up.

WARNING: Even though the game claims to support Linux, support is very bad. It would not save my game. I restarted it again in Windows and was able to play through without problems.

I don't know about this game. Generally it is a standard HOG game and good if you need some new game, but a lot of the mini games annoyed me more than entertained me. The story is nice and I did enjoy it, still, I have mixed feelings. It is not bad, no, there are way worse games out there, but it is also not really good. I do recommend it, simply because we are always short of games in this genre and it will keep you going for a couple of hours. I played expert level and had wishes for the skip button with some of the puzzles. You cannot change it mid game.

Keeps crashing on me, usually between every 5-10 minutes.

Their first game is much better and done, this game need some fixing, maybe this game was rushed by publisher.

I really wish Steam had a "meh" option.
Fall of the New Age Premium Edition is a HOG-lite puzzle adventure game from a studio that shows a lot of potential. Having previously played Namariel Legends: Iron Lord Premium Edition also by Shaman Games, (which was excellent by the way,) I had high hopes for Fall of the New Age. Some were met, some weren't.

The Good.
Great art style, graphics and cutscenes, as good if not better than the best offerings of the more established studios in the genre.
The sound effects and soundtrack fit the story.
The story for the first 66% of the game is very good, then it starts to get lazy.
Lots of puzzles.
Interesting game mechanics regarding the use of a slingshot, having to don various disguises, and a mix of both standard HO scenes and scenes that require you to find object outlines.

The Bad.
Bugs. Two puzzles were impossible to complete because the objects I needed to drag got stuck. Restarting had the same problem. (Windows 7 64bit)
Two cut scenes were in the wrong order, with a soldier I discover in a stables asking where his money is, and when I get the money and try to give it to him a few minutes later, it then launches the correct scene, where I run into him for the first time and the cutscene shows I know him and he asks for money if I want his help.
There are some jewels you pick up, you need 3 parts, I found 2, I never found the third, there's even a gate that requires all three parts. They are never used and you never need to open the gate. You end the game with 2/3 jewels in your inventory.
While the story begins strongly you soon realise it's the usual rescue a friend/family member with supernatural elements .... why do HOGs rarely try something original?
The game is too easy! The puzzles almost autosolve in a lot of cases, the lockpicking scenes are move a pin at random until a hole appears, and the point and click is incredibly simple with most objects required for progress found in the same scene or very near it. An experienced HOG player won't find much challenge in this game.
The "Premium Edition" adds a bonus chapter, in Namariel Legends, it was almost an hour long, original, and added to the story. I expected the same here .... nope, the "bonus" chapter is simply the final chapter. It feels as though the developer simply cut the last chapter from the game, leaving it unfinished, just so they could add it back as a "premium edition with bonus content." If you don't play the bonus chapter, the game ends mid-story ... the bad guys get to carry out their evil plan, and almost everything you did up to that point is meaningless. Your inventory even carries over into the bonus chapter! It's not a bonus chapter, it's the final act!

The problem with Fall of the New Age is that it's all icing and no cake. It looks great, it sounds great, the cutscenes are awesome, the story begins well, and then you discover that there's very little substance behind it. The storyline is generic, the game/puzzles aren't challenging, The voice acting is terrible. The game places you in an urgent life or death situation on 3 occasions and then waits for you to tour the town, have a few conversations, solve a few puzzles, and then eventually get back to the point where an executioner still has his axe raised over your brother's head, the librarian is still lying in the burning building, or the chemist is still coughing out his last breath after being poisoned! It's not a terrible game, but it falls incredibly short of Namariel Legends.

Sadly I can't recommend this game. They had some nice ideas for the HOG and the disguises are nice, too. But they didn't do it with heart. For the first disguise you had to work with the pieces. All following disguises were just drag and drop. The faces of the characters were like masks and some of the animations were just wrong. The so called "bonus episode" were just a cut of part of the main episiode. :/ The thing that annoyed me the most is, that the hint button didn't work properly. It guided me to other locations or just told me that I couldn't do anything in the location I was in - but that was wrong. Lucky me - the walkthrough is included in the game interface.

Fall of the New Age is one of those games that make me wish steam reviews had a "mixed" option. As others have said, it's undoubtedly a HOG- or at least a casual adventure game, since actual hidden object sequences are refreshingly few and far between. It doesn't appear to be made with the same engine as many of the other HOGs on steam, making for some nice little changes to the formula. Another plus is that all the art is original- no collections of cobbled-together photo assets here.

It starts out with a bang, treating you to a bombastic (for the genre) 3D animated cutscene, then deposits you into a prison cell to escape from as your tutorial, like so many other medieval fantasy games. I'm not ashamed to admit, I was reasonably pumped up to begin playing.

As I proceeded, however, my enthusiasm began to trickle away. The plot, while fairly generic, seemed decent, but I found myself struggling to get a hold on it, since the storytelling was done EXTREMELY poorly. The localiztion is awful as well- almost all the dialogue is phrased awkwardly or incorrectly, and the characters' grasp on the english language seems to get looser as the game progresses. Furthermore, the subtitles often aren't quite the same as what the characters are saying, and the mouth animations match up worse than a kung-fu dub. Voice acting is acceptable in some cases and hilariously bad in others. The 3D cutscenes are reasonably impressive for a game like this, but the animation is often blocky and goofily exaggerated, and some of the character models look pretty bad.

Gameplay is alright, although some (not all) of the puzzles were more obnoxious than I'm used to- I skipped a couple of them. I found myself resorting to the hint button more than normal as well, in part because it was often difficult to tell a small 'active' area apart from the scenery. There are several puzzles that actually require you to write down a sequence of weird symbols to enter into a later combination lock. Sometimes these are recorded into your diary, but that takes up the entire screen when you open it and sometimes even resets puzzles, so you may as well just write them all down. There are some other complaints I had about specific puzzles, but most of them can safely be grouped under the general "obnoxious" gripe I mentioned above.

The game is rife with tiny quasi-bugs, like expository text popping up at the wrong time. For the most part they can be overlooked, although I was briefly stuck at least twice when the hint button pointed me toward a puzzle that the game wouldn't let me solve because I hadn't yet seen the solution key. The game also crashed once.
The biggest issue I ran into, however, was at the end of chapter 4, when you rescue your brother. A small cutscene played, and I was abruptly shunted back to the main menu where a popup told me I had completed the game. I was rather incredulous, since the story really hadn't been wrapped up, even though I did technically accomplish my character's original objective. After checking the bonus features to see if there was any extra bits of gameplay, I chalked it up to more of the bad storytelling I mentioned earlier, and headed to the store page to write a review.
However, right as I began to write, I noticed a couple screenshots in the store slideshow that I had never seen during my playthrough. My belief that I had somehow missed the end of the game reaffirmed, I booted it back up(once again being assured that I had completed the game) and tried pressing "play" again, which finally allowed me to play the final chapter.

While the game is definitely not overtly bad, and offers some refreshing differences from many other HOGs on steam, there are unfortunately too many rough patches for me to give this a recommendation. I would, however, like to see more from this studio, hopefully with a little more polish.

One of the best Hidden Object Games on Steam, telling the story of a young thief in the Middle Ages on a mission to save her brother from an evil cult. Engaging story, good puzzles and HO scenes, good quality videos too, 3 difficulty settings. After the main story there are a playable chapter and other extras, unfortunately no achievements.

Very buggy on Linux, devs are non-responsive.