Solving Crimes at Sea
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Fancy a trip on a luxury ocean liner. Before you decide, I should point out that this trip will be more of a working exercise than a holiday excursion. By accepting to join the cruise of the liner Eris you will be required to solve the mystery behind the so-called accidental death of John Hewitt as you take part in Whispered Secrets - Cruise of Misfortune, a Hidden Object Adventure game developed by Grandma Games. You will be require to use your undoubted skills as you are employed to investigate the death of your employer's older brother.
Using the magic of computer-based Time and Location re-assignment, this game will take you to Liverpool harbour on the 3rd September 1917. You can then prepare to join the other guests waiting to board the cruise ship Eris. Hopefully none of your fellow guests and crew member will have been affected too much by the recent news of the Titanic sinking and subsequent loss of life.
Having met your client, the younger brother of John Hewitt, whose death you will be investigating, and rescued your travel ticket from a pesky seagull, you can board the Eris. Fortunately, as crew members are rather sparse. the number of passengers taking the cruise is limited so there are not too many hold-ups. Apart from your client and four main suspects, you hardly see or encounter anybody. Maybe one reason for the scarcity of crew members is that most facilities on board are automatic and are carried out by the presentation of a pass card and key.
Moving around the gaming environment follows the standard pattern as the mouse cursor changes shape to indicate when different actions are possible. While retaining the bottom of the screen for positioning tools, there are some minor changes to those available to the player. Starting with a Journal, automatically recording information, further tools provide details of your current task, Strategy Guide, Inventory, Evidence folder, Map and Hint feature. Any evidence found will need to be placed within the correct slot in the folder.
Positioned on the left side of the screen will be a fly-out tab. This will provide details regarding Collectibles and Puzzle pieces found. These items are scattered throughout the game. Each scene in the game will contain such items including one that will change its appearance by morphing. The fly-out will let you know whether you have collected all the required items in the scene or not.
One aspect of Help featured in this game, but not yet mentioned, is that of the appearance of ghosts. From time to time ghostly figures will make an appearance during the game. Sometimes the appearance will be used to point you in a particular direction or a specific area. The ghostly presence could also help in getting you out of a particular difficult situation,
When not dealing with ghosts or gathering evidence, you will be faced by a variety of mini game puzzles and Hidden Object scenes. Generally offering a choice of Easy or Hard version of the puzzle, these tasks will be presented in an overlaid window. You might need to swap elements to create an image, destroy ships with cannonballs, navigate a maze, avoid icebergs, position items in the correct countries and win a fisticuff fight.
As usual an outbreak of sparkles will point you towards a Hidden Object scene. Sometimes the scene will consist of a single scene or arrive in book format as you proceed through pages. There was also one example where the scene is spread over a number of scenes. Sometimes text will be used for the required list of items, as silhouettes or part of the actual scene. With each Hidden Object scene you will have the option to switch to Match 3 game play.
The Collector's Edition of this title comes with a Bonus Chapter story plus a Hidden Chapter that only becomes available once all the Collectibles have been found. You can download Whispered Secrets - Cruise of Misfortune from Gamehouse.com where it is priced at $19.99. It is also available from Big Fish Games priced at £14.74. The game requires a 1.8 GHz processor with 1024MB of RAM and 878MB of hard disk space running Windows 7 and later.
Whispered Secrets - Cruise of Misfortune Collector's Edition | GameHouse
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