Hey,
remember Aaron Connors and Chris Jones? They are the creative team
responsible for some private investigator character name of Tex Murphy
who starred in games like Under
a Killing Moon, Overseer
and The
Pandora Directive. Yeah, I know it’s been a long
time, but they have finally got their act together, got their mind
off of golf and developed their first new game since…well, longer
than I care to remember.

Now, before you geriatric
adventurers out there – and I’m one of them – tinkle in
your Depends, both Tex and his fedora are still in retirement. Taking
a page from Jane Jensen’s notebook (Inspector
Parker, Women’s
Murder Club) Aaron and Chris have taken a stab at advancing
the casual game genre beyond its simplistic roots to the point where
we now have not only puzzles and plot, but also animation and voice-acting.
Can anyone say adventure game in disguise?

Those
of you who still read the phrase ‘casual game’ and immediately
picture variations of Tetris or Scavenger
Hunt, your confusion is understandable and to be fair, maybe
it is time that the developers of games such as Three Cards
to Midnight and Women’s Murder Club
agreed on a new genre designation so that their product can be differentiated
from the more simplistic offerings. For as you’re about to learn,
TCM is much more advanced and anything but a casual
game.

Three
Cards to Midnight (TCM) is being billed
by its developers as a psychological thriller. The story centers around
Jess Silloway, a young woman who upon the eve of celebrating her thirtieth
birthday, awakens to find herself in a room with a strange man. She
has no recollection of the past few days and the man explains to Jess
that he is there to help her remember and then lays out a series of
Tarot cards that are meant to trigger memories from Jess’ subconscious.

The
mystery gradually unfolds over the course of eight chapters, each
of which is similar in concept. The story was influenced by The
Twilight Zone television series both in tone and execution
(In fact, if one looks closely, one might find a few references to
The Twilight Zone in some of the scenes). As each
chapter begins, Jess is asked to choose between three Tarot cards.
Each Tarot card is meant to trigger a memory of a person or location
of significance to an event from Jess’ past. All three Tarot
cards must be chosen in each chapter so that the order in which they
are chosen is not important.

Once
a card has been chosen, Jess will speak aloud a series of one to four
keywords that she associates with that card. We are then taken to
a location from Jess’ memory, such as a room in her apartment
or aboard her parent’s boat, where objects must be found that
connect to the keywords. Once all of the objects have been found,
a flashback is triggered that unlocks a key point of the story and
there are as many as twelve animated flashbacks per chapter.

Now
lest you think this is but a simple game of searching for and then
highlighting an object, it is anything but and often requires much
thought. When a keyword appears at the bottom of the screen, it may
have five blank squares to the left and three blank squares to the
right. So if the keyword is ‘light’, then you must find
objects on the screen that, when combined with the keyword, create
a new word. So, for example, if there is a doll house in the room,
when clicked on it would create the back-word ‘lighthouse’.
A painting on the wall of a nighttime scene with a crescent moon would
create the front-word ‘moonlight’. As the game progresses,
the associations become more difficult and thought-provoking. Depending
on the level of difficulty chosen to begin the game – Easy,
Challenge or Gamer – you are allocated a pre-determined amount of
incorrect picks per room and also a limited number of clues before
the area resets. Each chapter also has between one and three puzzles,
the type of which can be found in any adventure game such as cryptograms
and sliders.

Great
care has been taken to provide both a back-story and depth to the
character. The music is appropriately eerie and the voice-actors excellent.
The animated flashbacks and present-day scenes in the game are the
final link that elevate TCM above casual status.

TCM is
intriguing both in its approach and execution and can be very addictive.
But honestly, it would be a huge disappointment if developers with
the pedigrees of Connors and Jones were to offer anything of lesser
quality.

Three Cards to
Midnight is currently only available as a pc download from
the Big Finish website at a cost of $20. Aaron and Chris are considering
the possibility of releasing a special boxed edition of the game if
there would be such a demand from the fanbase (and you all know how
much we adventure gamers love our boxes!).

System Requirements:

• Processor Speed: 600
  MHZ
• Minimum RAM: 256MB
• Direct X: 9.0c
• OS: Windows XP, Vista
  (probably supports ME, 2000 and 98, however this is untested)