Pearl's Peril on Facebook: Solving this mystery is no cheap (or quick) task

Last month, we brought you a preview of Pearl's Peril, Wooga's first attempt at a hidden object game that will be launching on mobile sometime in Q2 of this year. Today marks the game's launch on Facebook, but unfortunately, this is one slow-moving, expensive hidden object game that leaves a lot to be desired.

The storyline of Pearl's Peril is easily the game's best feature. Pearl's an ace pilot in the late 1920's, whose father's supposed suicide sends her back to the family estate that has fallen into disrepair. You'll complete a variety of hidden object scenes as you work to solve the mystery of Pearl's father's death, but the game lacks a real flow to keep you moving forward.

Scenes are unlocked by gathering Prestige Points, with these points being earned by building items on the estate. You'll only have a few buildings to choose from at first, with others being unlocked over time (a lot of time). While the item designs are pretty, the game's beginner items either take far too long to build or cost too many coins or "Cash," the game's premium currency, to purchase. Everything about Pearl's Peril is expensive, as you'll have a maximum energy cap of just five energy, and a single scene requires at least one energy to complete.

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If you're keeping track, that gives you a chance to finish just five scenes in a single sitting, before waiting 20 minutes for even a single energy point to recharge, or purchasing extra energy using real money. The game's scenes are straightforward and unremarkable, asking you to find items on text based lists, and while each scene starts simply, additional items are added in through subsequent play-throughs.

The expected mastery system sees you replaying each scene dozens of times before it can be completely mastered, and there's little in the way of quests or any outside content to guide you along. The storyline is simply locked in later chapters that are impossible to reach without earning every last mastery ribbon on all of the scenes that came before.

While it's a common trend for Facebook games to start with a bang, offering tons of content that then tapers off to a slower pace, Pearl's Peril starts slowly right from the beginning. There's no extra content here, the island mechanic is fairly stale and unoriginal, and there's simply far too little to do while waiting for your energy to recharge. While each scene may have multiple items to find over the course of its five individual mastery ribbons, by the time you've earned three ribbons in a scene, you'll have memorized the location of almost every item, taking the challenge out of the game as well.

Putting it simply, Pearl's Peril is a game of waiting, or spending, as you can move on more quickly by shelling out a ton of real world money. That's not an engaging setup, and the game needs a lot of work before it can be recommendable.

Play Pearl's Peril on Facebook >

Have you tried Pearl's Peril? What do you think of Wooga's first foray into the hidden object game space? Sound off in the comments!