ukpetdSpace Cadet
Posts : 176
Joined: 27 JUL 2007
Status : Online | This is the fifth in the series of Carol Reed mysteries produced by Swedish developer MDNA games. Like all the previous games, this one is mouse driven and plays in first person. The graphics are a succession of stills from a video camera. Voice work is well done. There is no animation in the game, a succession of stills provide some credibility during conversations. The game uses the Wintermute game engine which has a dozen save slots. It saves and loads slowly.
The game comes on one CD-rom which installs on the hard disk and the disk is not required in the drive for play.
The mystery is set in Norrköping. All conversations are in English, with subtitles. Puzzles are mainly inventory based (including combination of objects). There are some puzzles requiring thinking outside of the inventory.
The story is a human one. Carol, an English girl and private detective, promises to try and find a neighbour’s son. From this low key start a whole game emerges, slowly but surely taking in some surprising locations. Petroglyphs, docks and paintballing, amongst other things, are in there somewhere. Suffice to say that the game can be taken as a travelogue of the town and environs.
Within the game there is a map, initially fairly empty, which gradually fills up as new locations are flagged up. This takes the hard work out of getting around. What is new in this series is a built-in hint system. The on screen notebook, when consulted, gives a location and object which are the next to be visited/sought. This should be used sparingly, since working out the next move(s) is/(are) part of the game.
I found lots of little surprises, objects which I knew I wanted kept turning up when solving a different puzzle. Swedish tax offices write their documents in English (not true, but shows that the developer really took localisation to heart). Len Green runs a shipping line (not true either, this is a tribute to the games “creative consultant”).
Music was suitably suspenseful and none annoying.
The game is very moral i.e. no cussing, no innuendos, and return the objects “borrowed”.
When the game was over and the loose ends were tied up in during the final sequence, I felt quite a wrench, simply because I became so involved in the mystery. This is the mark of a good game. I highly recommend it. Perhaps not for young children, but certainly from 13 and upwards. Expect roughly 20 hours play without recourse to the hint system – maybe shorter if you search in all the right places or use the hints.
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