Scavenger Hunter was painstakingly developed over a period of 7 years by (Canadian) Anne Gregory & husband.  It is primarily a puzzle adventure, with a very great number of puzzles, most of them (but not all) fairly easy.  It is a 1st person slide-show type mouse-driven game with no actual movement or NPC’s (non-playing-characters).  There is hardly any story involved, but at the end you receive a financial reward for all the different stolen items you retrieve, plus a bonus if you have also somehow acquired and utilized all the special crystals… one in each different world.

As such, Scavenger Hunter may not be everybody’s cup of tea, although it should be noted that none of the main aspects which infuriate different segments of the adventurers’ community are present.  There are NO action sequences, mazes, slider puzzles, or music or sound problems, and no irritating voice acting!

The main innovative and determining feature in this game is due to the fact that many players keep clamoring for something different… and this certainly IS different!!  The basic concepts of the game are fundamentally dissimilar to all the other very many Quest-Adventure games that I (personally) have played to date.

To elaborate more fully:  I have read that many adventurers replay some of their games… sometimes several times.  I do not, since I never have the time or energy.  This is not strictly true since I have replayed a very small handful of my most favorite games a 2nd time… a few of the LucasArts & Sierra classics, Gabriel Knight’s, & Tex Murphy’s.

However, almost exactly 10 years ago I ordered and bought direct from Lucas Arts their fundamentally different Indiana Jones and his Desktop Adventures.  I have never seen any reference to it on any of the Quest-Adventure Forums, but I have played & thoroughly enjoyed it on and off hundreds of times over the past decade.

True it is ‘only’ a tile-game, and as such, each episode takes anywhere between ½ to 2 hours to fully complete, depending upon the experience of the player and his/her initial optional difficulty settings.  The real originality is that every time you play you obtain a completely different ‘world’ and set of puzzles, and so every game is different.  There are an almost infinite number of parameters and hence you never ever play the identical game twice!!

Although Scavenger Hunter’s gameplay, full screen, resolution, locations, etc. are much more up to date and elaborate, its basic idea is very similar.
There may not be an INFINITE number of permutations, but there are certainly many thousands or maybe even tens of thousands of different combinations, and it’s hard to imagine that any player, or any different players, will ever come up with exactly the same game more than once.

When each and every game is started from scratch, 5 worlds are selected at random from a total of 9 different words (I understand that more could be added later!).  So even the chances of any player obtaining the identical 5 worlds more than once is fairly small.  You may get say 2, or 3, of the worlds that you obtained last time you (or anybody else) played, but the others are most likely to be different.

But that is far from all!  At the beginning of every new game the randomizer chooses several other variable parameters.  Altogether there are 22 stolen items scattered throughout the 9 worlds and each time you play you have to find and acquire as many as possible of those which are present in your particular worlds.  There are generally somewhere around 17 (plus or minus) of these different valuables in each game.

Furthermore, these stolen objects appear in different locations and under different circumstances in each game.  There are also various puzzles, albeit generally fairly easy ones, which are also randomized and tend to differ somewhat for each game.

On the other hand, as in Indy-Desktop-Adventures, there are certain basic procedures which are the same for every iteration of the game.

For example and without revealing details, I found (when beta testing fairly extensively) that when I first played the game it took me several hours until I fully understood everything that I needed to do and how to perform same!

The second time was definitely a good deal easier, and after 3 or 4 play-throughs I became reasonably proficient.  I well remember Anne emailing me early on, that since she created all aspects of the game and obviously knew it back to front & inside out, she could finish any game in about 90 minutes.  I never got fully to that stage and I believe that it would take very many games to do so, but since you can repeat the game as often as you have some spare time (maybe on a long flight or a wait for an appointment, etc., etc.), one complete game can fill up some of those boring moments in life!

So, although some aspects of the game may not appeal to everybody, the sub-title of Scavenger Hunter i.e. “A New Dimension in Adventure Gaming” is definitely well warranted… at least in my opinion!