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Find the Bicycle
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As its title indicates, this next game combines some serious Hidden Object game play with a smattering of detective action. Developed by Jet Dogs Studios, Shopping Clutter 17 - Detective Agency classifies itself as a puzzle game which is set in the environment of Animalville. The inhabitants of this place go about their business in a happy manner and crime was non-existence apart from an occasional parking problem.
But everything changed when the Walker family bought their youngest a bicycle for his birthday. Somebody stole the bicycle. Despite the best efforts of the police, the crime remained unsolved and so the Walker family set up their own Detective Agency to catch the criminal with your help.
The game can be played in full screen mode with a custom cursor. Adjustments can be made to the audio levels used by background music and sound effects with profiles being created to record the progress made by different players. The game can be tackled in either Easy or Difficult mode with the former allowing you to work at your own speed. Selecting Difficult mode will apply a time limit with the promise of a better score for a faster performance.
In order to solve the crime of the stolen bicycle, you will need to work through 20 levels of game play. Each level consists of seven separate Hidden Object Clutter levels and a mini game puzzle which needs to be completed in order to progress to the next level.
The game's Hidden Object Clutter levels follow a similar patter regarding their make-up. You start with a brief description of the rules that apply to that particular Clutter puzzle. You could be asked to collect just items of a particular type such as an animal, headwear, contains wood or is office equipment. Object might need to be collected in pairs or larger groups. When collecting pairs, they might need to be of different sizes or colour while not being mirrored images or halves of the same item.
As with the collection rules, the display of supplied items varies a great deal. Sometimes the items will be scattered, layers deep, over the whole available area or piled high in a single column than needs to be broken up so as to reveal its content. In some cases the column may contain actual images or silhouettes shaded in different colours. Other arrangements of the Clutter include bands across the area, a circle or triangle which can be either static or constantly moving around and thus adding to the difficulty when selecting items. In many cases you will need to move unwanted items out of the way to find a necessary item.
Along with the collection of items, each scene will feature multiple stars that add to the clutter. These stars do serve a useful purpose. By collecting enough stars you can charge the game's Hint feature for use. When used this feature will reveal the location of a possible match for the current level.
As mentioned the game is spread over 20 levels of Clutter investigation collection. Once the seven Hidden Object challenges have been met then you will be faced by a mini game puzzle. In many cases this could involve putting a scene back together by rearranging sections or bands of the original image. Another type of mini game puzzle that appears occasionally will require the matching of face down cards.
I downloaded my copy of this game from Gamehouse.com where it is priced at $9.99 for those who can not get enough of Hidden Object Clutter game play. You can also download the game from Big Fish Games where it is priced at £7.87. The game requires a 1.0 GHz processor with 512MB of RAM and 269MB of hard disk space running Windows 7 and later.
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