PC Game Review: Passport to Perfume

Ready for some sweet-smelling success? You can do it by running a perfume business in Passport to Perfume, and without driving the nose crazy in sniffing the different perfumes and colognes. OK, OK, I’ll cut it out with the scent talk.

Picture this: It’s the 1940s and a young woman, Sophia, we learn about her father’s accidental death from years before. She runs her own perfume shop when a package arrives containing her father’s diary. The diary reveals ingredients and where to find them in order to create Marie Antoinette’s fragrance.

The diary inspires Sophia to grow her shop and travel in between to search for various ingredients to recreate the special fragrance and others. She makes and sells perfumes in three locales stocking her selves with different shaped bottles with different colors and features.

Every couple of time management scenes, she takes off for various countries to track down special ingredients. These scenes switch to hidden object game mode where Sophia looks for hidden ingredients to use in her fragrances. After collecting the ingredients and new bottles, she can create new fragrances.

When she returns to her store, she needs to refill her stock as needed and buy upgrades. She can upgrade her store to add decor to bring in more customers and compel them to be more patient. Other upgrades allow her to speed the machines.

You play the Passport to Perfume store scenes in time management style, fulfilling customer orders. These scenes can turn wild and frenzied as customers request specific features making it all too easy to mess up an order. The difficulty level may be too easy for experienced players, but still challenge them in terms of trying to get the orders right. Or they can skip story mode and try the more challenging game play in endless mode.

The hidden object game play feels repetitive and tedious to find these ingredients using a brush and shovel. The hidden objects take little effort to find with the eyes, but a lot of mouse work in dealing with the tools to reveal ingredients and bottles hiding behind leaves and dirt. The ingredient part, even the entire game, would be more fun had it “copied” the Chocolatier formula.

The machines might drive you crazy. You can click the machines to send Sophia to the machine, but then nothing happens. You must press the button to activate the machine. Very annoying. The whole thing should work as one. The graphics disappoint. They just don’t measure up to the standards set in other time management games.

Passport to Perfume serves up a neat theme that some will find everything rosy. Give it a try and download Passport to Perfume.