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The game of World Keepers belongs to the popular Hidden Object Adventure genre.  Your role in this game is that of Corsair Elizabeth Robinson, a sea captain who embarks on a voyage to help her close friend Ethan Brown.  Your task is to help him locate his lost son, Adam, who has somehow become involved with an evil force that leaves behind a trail of destruction and victims reduced to rags and bones.  To help you with this task are a number of Keepers who have special abilities that can be called upon from time to time to defeat the evil force and the bodily remains of a pirate crew.

As usual with games of this type, you can create named profiles to help record the progress of individual players.  These profiles can contain the volume levels for background music and sound effects but not spoken dialogue as this game just uses printed dialogue.  The lack of spoken dialogue was rather disappointing.  There are also options to play in full screen mode with a graphics cursor which changes shape to reflect when different actions are possible.

Three levels of difficulty are available with this game.  At the easiest levels, Regular mode has the quickest Hint and Skip recharge features with highlighted active zones and a tutorial.  Hard mode has a slower recharge rate, highlighted active zones but no tutorial.  Finally Expert mode has even slower recharging, gives no indicated where active zones are located and again does not feature a tutorial.

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Spread over seven chapters, a brief introductory sequence lays the groundwork for your involvement in helping Ethan Brown locate his lost son and discover the mystery behind the appearance of the evil force.  You do not have to wait too long before this evil force makes an appearance as darkness sets up a collision between your vessel and that of a pirate ship crewed by skeletons.  Funnily enough the presence of your crew members is conspicuous by their absence with even poor Ethan Brown being found dead.

Running across the bottom of the screen during the Adventure elements of the game are the tools available to you.  Taking up a central position is the game’s inventory holding the various items that you have collected or have been awarded for completing certain tasks.  By hovering the mouse cursor over these items, the title of each one just will be revealed in case you need some additional clue as to its purpose.

To the left of the inventory is your journal which automatically records any clues and important information you discover.  The journal also holds a map of the area once it has been found.  This map will indicate your current location plus any visited previously and those were tasks need to be completed.  Clicking on a location will immediately transfer you there as you continue your investigation.

Linking together the game’s various chapters are cut-scenes.  A similar approach is used when the individual Keepers are introduced to the game.  As each Keeper is introduced there will be a fairly lengthy dialogue session with mouse clicks being required to move through the conversation.  Still images of each Keeper will be displayed and a headshot of your character to show who is delivering the printed lines.

Not afraid to re-use locations for Hidden Object scenes, World Keepers presents you with a text list of items to find in a cluttered scene.  If any of the items in the list are coloured red then an additional action will be required before it can be selected.  You might need to find a missing element, open a container or cut away restraints are just some examples.  After finding all the items in a list, you will be rewarded with one of them and it will automatically be added to the inventory.

Although appearing not as frequency as Hidden Object scenes, there are some puzzles to be solved.  Generally some though has gone into the type and style of the puzzle to fit within the game’s appearance and story line.  In some cases these puzzles can be solved by a trial and error approach similar to the one I adopted when connecting the start and end of a series of threads.

Overall World Keepers ticked all the various boxes apart from the lack of dialogue delivered by voice actors.  This is a game that I enjoyed playing.  The game requires a 1.5GHz processor with 1000MB of RAM and 930MB of hard disk space running Windows 7 and later.  This game is available from various gaming websites for $9.99.

http://www.gamehouse.com/download-games/world-keepers-last-resort