Anna's Quest takes us on a journey with a sweet, innocent little girl named Anna, who's been sheltered from the horrors of the world by her grandfather. He's kept her locked away in their cabin in the woods until he comes down with a mysterious ailment and she has to leave home to find a cure. Once she leaves, an evil witch kidnaps her and unlocks the power of telekinesis in her, which she now has to use to not only escape the witch's clutches but still manage to find the cure for her grandfather.
Like any point and click adventure, Anna's Quest features lots of random objects and weird things to interact with. What's awesome about Anna's Quest though, is that it has a very simple interface for players. Left mouse to use, right to look, and click on the telekinesis icon and then the object in question to use your power on said item. By using the space button on the keyboard, you can actually highlight all the items on the screen that can be interacted with, which allows the player to see everything on the screen that could possibly be fiddled with, which makes things very easy for the player. Instead of having to randomly click around trying to figure out which miscellaneous stick or window can be touched, the game points it out for you.
And of course, knowing which items can be used, touched and fiddled with is half of the game right there. In any adventure game, you have to be able to touch, poke and in this case, telekinesis your way through the game and to the grand conclusion. I found that the puzzles in Anna's Quest were actually very approachable and very easy to manage. With a little bit of fiddling, most of them were actually very easy to get by. I may have had to walk around and go back and forth, but I didn't find myself gnashing my teeth in anger and wanting to punch a hole into my computer monitor in anger. The puzzles were very approachable.
As a matter of fact, there were only a few exceptions to this. In a few cases, I found that there were some puzzles were I either had the clues or the objects needed to complete them and found the game intensely uncooperative in allowing me to complete them. While trying to complete, I had an extreme amount of difficulty and at a certain point, I had to take advantage of an option given to me by the game. Skip the puzzle. On the one hand, it's nice that it was there. On the other hand, it tells me a lot when a game gives you the option to skip a particular puzzle. It tells me that the developer knew that there was some kind of flaw inherent in the design for them to have given that option when playing the game on a normal difficulty. It doesn't seem like it should need to be there otherwise.
Random difficult puzzles aside, Anna herself was absolutely adorable. Every time she used her ability she let out this cute little squeak that I found to be the cutest thing ever. I thought I'd get sick of it after a while, but I didn't. It was cute every time. The graphics were bubbly and cute and they just matched Anna's adorable little personality. Even when she was being psychopathic and her actions had some slightly sadistic outcomes, she was still cute as a button and I was rooting for her the whole time. The sound quality was wonderful and the music melted into the background and just accentuated what was going on during the story.
Selling this game, more than anything else, is said story. It was fun, interesting and very sweet all wrapped up in one little package. While some parts of it may have seemed a little predictable, it was still fun to watch the whole thing play out and fun to travel with Anna on her journey and to try to get to the conclusion of it all. As everything started to unravel and all the pieces came together it became more interesting and all the little side characters were amusing as they popped in and out. It was a wonderful experience that I'd recommend to anyone and everyone: pick up Anna's Quest and spend some time with her. I'd telekinesis a copy into your Steam account, but I'm nowhere near as cool as her.