Mind's Eye: Secrets of the Forgotten review

It's been a while since I made a review.

So, today I will be talking about another HO game. Unlike most HO's this applies parallax scrolling, which is actually something you can see in a game as old as 1982, but it was applied to a Hidden Object game, which is pretty neat.

Off to review: Mind's Eye: Secrets of the Forgotten

Story: You are Gabrielle Jennings, a journalist trying to find the next hit story. What started out as a suicide turned into a murder which lead to investigating the subconscious.

Now, while there seemed to be a lot of details left unexplained (The game didn't really flesh out most if not all of the characters. Hell, one character was just there for ONE scene and you never see her again.) the core story was pretty good. I liked the idea that it dealt with amnesia without using the usual cliche amnesia plot. They actually based it on Amnesia that ACTUALLY exists. Kudos to some research. I hope next time they make the game a little longer. Placing difficult mini-games is a nice way to take my time, but it doesn't always work that way.



I'm talking about YOU!

Art: The scenes were WONDERFULLY done. I think it can be a little too dark for most casual gamers to play, but for me it was great. I partly wished they made the scenes more disturbing, but I guess that would mean a rating or something.

What irked me was the big discrepancy between the character art used in the dialogs with the character art used in the cutscenes. I dunno, for me it was a BIG turn off. While I found the character art in the game was beautiful, the one in the cutscene seemed rushed and thus, quality was compromised.

Another...has anyone noticed the OTHER discrepancy?




Dark tiles with green stuff on it.



Then it became brown....okay...

The actual game: Adding the parallax was a great innovation, so that's a big plus for me. In some ways it gave the player a slight difficulty to the game, since now you have a bigger scene to work with. The sad part was at most times I felt the parallax wasn't efficiently used. There are some scenes were you hardly have to use it. Why bother putting a feature like that if you won't maximize it?

Due to the parallax, it may have been a little harder to pick up items. I didn't have too much of a problem with most of it, but it's something a developer needs to consider in the future. My suggestion? Use bigger HO items.

Another thing I'd like to note is how the dialogue was written. The formatting at times was an eye-sore. There were times where the sentences weren't line-breaked too well.



So, what's the overall say?

Overall, it was a great idea and I think this will be in some ways a benchmark for HO games to go beyond what they are now.

That's all for now!

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Mystery Case Files- Prime Suspects Review

For my first review, I'll be starting off with Mystery Case Files: Prime Suspects.

Story: Someone stole a diamond. There are 20 suspects. Find the culprit.

Game Mechanics: Basically the goal is to go through around 20 set of possible suspects by searching through random locations on the map. Once you've found all the "clues", you go through your Crime Computer and piece them out through mini-games to see if the person is innocent or not.

This cycle continues until you have to find the actual diamond.

Here are some screenshots of the game:




The case report, which talks about the different suspects.



The map of Capitol City, where there are different HO scenes to find your clues



The Crime Computer

My opinion:

Story-wise, it looked like they focused more on making the game and then just making a story out of it. While they say that casual gamers don't care too much about a story, for me I felt that story is STILL important which is why games like Ravenhearst became so popular.

Like a lot of HO games, it borders around the "find clues by finding random objects" idea. So, yes it's possible you need to find 3 kinds of keyboards which has no relation to the case.

Difficulty wise, Prime Suspects is kinda tricky. Not only is the area messy like a lot of HO games, I noticed they love to mess with the ambiguity of the English language.



THE MESS

Example: 2 spades. A spade could either be a face of a card, or a shovel. You'd think once you'd find a shovel the second one would also be a shovel.

Wrong. Most likely the second spade you'll be looking for is the one you see on playing cards. It makes one think out of the box, which is great.

Along with ambiguity, they added another feature that may make it easier or harder for the player which is the x-ray/flashlight feature.



X-ray feature



Flashlight feature

To make things a little interesting certain parts of the map required that you find a battery in other locations to be able to find other items. I don't know if this makes the game easier or harder, because it has it's pros and cons. Still an interesting thing to place though.

So for every time you find all the clues per investigation, you use the Crime Computer and play 3 different mini-games. One is puzzle-type game, one is crossword-type of game and the last is a memory game. All 3 have one goal which is to see the underlying picture.



Sample Mini-game (Puzzle)

These mini-games are the easy to finish. The hardest one of all was the crossword puzzle, since that required me to think. (The first one was to find 10 breakfast foods...not only do I not eat breakfast, but I'm unaware of what Americans usually eat for breakfast.)

Overall:

If you're the type who just wants to find things, with no other complications like finding a key to open a door or to have a deep complex story, Prime Suspects is the game for you. Note that like the Ravenhearst series items are REALLY tricky to find due to the messy scenes, but that's worth the challenge right?


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