Mortimer Beckett and the Secrets of Spooky Manor completely captivated me from the first puzzle. This kind of seek and find game is what I’ve been looking for since Mystery Case Files. Like MCF, this hidden object game contain puzzles where players pick up or move pieces to make something happen. In these games, the puzzles are more of a guest star. In Secrets of Spooky Manor, the puzzles become the star. Only one drawback: It’s too short!
Each puzzle requires finding hidden objects — but not the normal way you see in most games. And this is NOT yet another seek and find game or hidden object game. Instead, you must find the pieces of the hidden object. A clock, for instance, could have four pieces for finding in the scene before the object appears in your inventory. Every scene hides the pieces of four objects, which boosts the challenge and cuts the predictability.
After reuniting all the pieces to recreate the objects, you can either go to the other rooms to find the rooms’ objects, try to solve the puzzle or place an object that belongs in the scene such as a putting a chess piece back on its chessboard. While nothing happens in object placement, it keeps the boredom away and makes solving the puzzle more challenging as you can’t easily figure out which piece goes where. Some objects belong in other rooms or the current room needs something from another room. For example, if you see an object needs turning off or on and your inventory contains nothing to fix this, it’s obvious the needed hidden object hides in another room.
Creating a game with a variety of puzzles takes more time than simply throwing objects into scenes for hidden object games. Nevertheless, I hope the Mortimer Beckett and the Time Paradox, its sequel (no date announced anywhere), will last longer and provide as much delight as any seek and find game would.Heck, I hope the developer plans at least two sequels! Unless you don’t like puzzles, finding things and solving things. Click here to download the demo now!