Scarlet Envelope: Ashes of Persepolis

Review

Game Description

“Travel to Ancient Greece to solve a mystery of Persepolis, the priceless Persian city burned to ashes by Alexander the Great. The hero’s secrets are interwoven into an intricate puzzle guarded by Olympian Gods and an all-seeing Oracle. Only the mightiest can read Oracle’s cards to find out what really happened in Persepolis.”

Personal Experience

I’m continuing in my push to catch up on Scarlet Envelope before the final envelope releases. After two excellent chapters, I was excited to dive into the next. Unfortunately, while this episode was a narrative standout, the puzzling side left me feeling a bit frustrated. But, the nice thing about this series is that I’m sure the next envelope will be very different. Overall it took me about two hours to make it through the experience.

Narrative

This time around we’re heading back to Ancient Greece, specifically to 330 BCE and the burning of Persepolis by Alexander the Great. It’s an event full of drama, passion, and tragedy, so it’s an excellent choice for an experience like this. I especially loved the focus on Thais, the Athenian courtesan who eventually became the Queen of Egypt. She’s such a larger-than-life historical figure who rarely gets her due, so it was wonderful to see her taking a co-starring role here. Admittedly, I’ve always had a soft spot for Greek mythology and history, but this is one of my favorite narratives in the entire Scarlet Envelope series.

The ancient Greek-inspired design of the puzzle components look beautiful while accentuating the story being the told. The videos do a great job with thematic stock footage and a compellingly performed voiceover narration to really sell the entire experience. This might be my favorite Scarlet Envelope narrative yet.

Puzzle Play

The puzzles, on the other hand, dropped this experience down from being a must-recommend masterpiece. The experience starts off with the two hardest puzzles, both very difficult. The back four then alternated between easy and difficult. If an experience has a variety of difficulties like this, I prefer a nice ramping up a of difficulty as the game progresses. Overall, this was probably the most difficult Scarlet Envelope chapter yet.

As for that second puzzle, I don’t mind a difficult puzzle. But, I think what tipped it over from very hard to very frustrating was knowing what needed to be done generally to solve it, but being unable to do so because there were so many possibilities of how it could have looked. I think some sort of nudge or direction as to what the final shape of the maze was supposed to look like would have gone a long way to helping that experience.

That said, after the frustrating start, I really enjoyed the puzzles in the back half of the game. There is a hint site available and, as always for Scarlet Envelope, it offers well-written progressive hints. I am not ashamed to admit that it was a crucial crutch for this one.

On another positive note, none of the puzzles required distinguishing between colors, that’s always a win in my book!

Recommendation

All that said, I do recommend Ashes of Persepolis. While it wasn’t my favorite Scarlet Envelope for the puzzles, it may have been for the narrative. If you do pick it up, know you’re in for a challenge and don’t be afraid to hit up that hint site if you get stuck.

I still recommend that most people start with Scarlet Envelope’s first experience Newspaper: Intro to Mysteries to get a taste of what they’re all about and then play through the whole experience if they enjoy it. In that linked review I also discuss whether you should go for the Starter/Regular or Experienced track.