I play a lot of hidden object games published by Artifex Mundi and recently been bingeing on games developed by Sunward. This particular episode of Endless Fables, "Shadow Within" is about a C grade. I'm not complaining about the consistent formula of very familiar puzzles and visual searching. I'm not especially snobby about stilted voice acting and cheesy dialog. But the Endless Fables series is increasingly dependent on attempted jump scares and lazy unmotivated plot devices. There is so little plot or narrative in these things, and magic is so universal, you'd think the writers would come up with a connected thread, but this episode in particular has several things that just left me going WTF?

In fact, they not only don't have verbal explanations, a couple of them are accompanied by a rapid jumble of blurred images. Example You give invalid Hans the Hedron, and suddenly he's out of bed and a possessed bad guy to fight/evade. The hint/narrative/self-dialog immediately before this was "Let's give it to Hans. He'll know what to do with it." Short flurry of incoherent images follows and now Hans is going for your throat. Perhaps this is a programming bug and that flurry of images was supposed to be a well-paced visual explanation of what's happening. But I suspect it's just sloppy writing and overdependence on jump scares.

There's other really lazy stuff. There's a middle-aged character who's introduced as Dr. So-and-So, but you drive with him to a castle where there's an announcement for So-and-So's doctoral exam. Just ... no. Academic committees don't administer oral exams in castles (at least ones that aren't also college buildings). Announcements of doctoral exams are usually not posted like concert flyers. And paper stuck to fences isn't going to last 20 years in the weather. A couple of sentences could have explained the exotic circumstances of So-and-So's unusual recent academic career, but no.

So, this is quite playable and familiar if you're just in it for the puzzles. But it's also rather annoying if you pay any attention whatsoever to the plot.