Mortimer Beckett

Hidden object games are great for packrats. Sifting through jam-packed rooms looking for random bits of junk to collect is like a dream come true. But what do you actually do with all that stuff? Usually nothing, the slate generally just wiped clean between levels to start all over again in the next. Enter one Mortimer Beckett to rectify that with his two games, The Secrets of Spooky Manor and The Time Paradox, two titles nipping so closely at the heels of traditional adventures that it’s hard to tell them apart.

While most seek-and-find games emphasize the seeking and finding (surprise!), the Mortimer Beckett games are just as focused on putting things back. Sure, you’ll still have to hunt down dozens of items, but in a nice twist on the standard formula, finding them represents only the first task for Mortimer. He’ll then need to return most of the missing items to their proper place, plus find an integral use for any others in order to continue his adventure. Hey, there’s that word again!

Actually, players don’t search for “items” at all, but only pieces of items. Rather than providing a large list of objects to gather, here there are only four in each screen. There’s even a large, handy image of each item along the bottom of the screen. Sounds too easy, right? Right. The trick is, they’re all split up into 3-5 fragments (increasing as you proceed in the game) that suddenly don’t look much like the picture anymore. Finding each piece in the environment removes that segment from the image, showing only the incomplete portions remaining.

For the most part, item recognition is quite reasonable, though some are hidden a little too far behind other objects to make out clearly. Naturally, some pieces are inherently harder to find than others. Little bits of a small key aren’t nearly as pronounced as colourful patches of clothing. Still, rooms are busy but not hopelessly cluttered, so a keen eye and patience is usually all you need, and since the games have no time limit of any kind, there’s no pressure. The two games do approach their help systems differently, though both are more than ample. In Spooky Manor, random clicking will result in the screen being semi-obscured briefly, but there’s no harm in simply waiting the penalty out, and really no reason why you’d bother guessing in the first place. If you can’t find something, there are a limited number of hints available per level, which are finite but more than enough for the rare time you might need to give in. The Time Paradox removes any consequence for guesswork entirely and replaces the limited hint restriction with a reusable hint-recharge method.

If you can’t find an item piece, however, chances are that you first need to solve one of the many inventory-like puzzles scattered throughout just about every location. That’s right, inventory application is fully integrated into the hidden object gameplay in the Mortimer Beckett games, which is where the real similarity to adventures kicks in. Any items you complete are stored either in a “misplaced items” inventory or a “puzzle items” group. (What’s this? A game actually calling a puzzle a puzzle? Somebody pinch me.) These inventories aren’t even limited to single screens, but entire levels that consist of up to five different locations each. You’ll frequently have to move between rooms to use an item in a different area than the one you collected it in, which is easily accomplished through a handy map screen.

Both types of objects are used in the same basic way, just for different purposes. All that’s required for misplaced items is clicking each one on the correct hotspot, conveniently highlighted in Spooky Manor but more subtly indicated by a context-sensitive cursor in Time Paradox. These hotpots are all thematically logical, like roses displayed in a vase or eggs being placed in a birds’ nest, so it’s generally very intuitive, and successfully restoring them yields a special code or unique object needed to ultimately complete the game. Puzzle items are applied the same way, but always result in something more immediately relevant, like access to that missing item piece you couldn’t find previously, or the exit to the next level in the game being revealed.

On rare occasions, there is an additional step involved, like filling a bucket with water. This replaces the empty bucket with a full one in inventory, and only the latter accomplishes the goal required. These are few and far between, however, and still very straightforward. Hotspots are fairly limited and easily identified, so you’ll never spend long thinking through solutions. There are riddle-like hints in a notebook for these, but they are so unnecessary I didn’t even realize it until I was done. Nevertheless, there are enough items involved over the course of each game’s eight levels to make things interesting – one random stage late in Spooky Manor had six puzzle items and fourteen misplaced objects to collect – so kudos to the developers for incorporating such a welcome element of interactivity. A puzzle doesn’t need to bang players over the head to make them feel like what they’re doing matters. This series gets that.

While The Secrets of Spooky Manor doesn’t include any other traditional puzzle types, The Time Paradox does, presenting a variety of different logic challenges from math to pattern to tile puzzles, with still others in between. None are very difficult, but they represent a clear shift towards making the sequel a more complete adventure. In fact, while the same core hidden object/returning item gameplay remains intact, the complexity has been ramped up between games in just about all areas. There are more screens per level (including many close-up areas not found in the original), more items to find, more cross-pollination between areas. “More” being the operative word, including game time, as the sequel easily surpasses the scant two hours or so offered by the first game. This move isn’t always successful, as the increased sense of non-linearity can at times be brought to its knees by some unnecessarily restrictive choke points, but it’s certainly a change from the breezy nature of the first game. You can even “talk” to the characters you meet in The Time Paradox. Or listen, anyway, as Mortimer never says anything. And really the others are mainly just props; more “objects” that happen to speak (in text only) their clues instead of merely representing one. That’s people for you – always complicating the simple things.

Both games feature similar production values, with nicely designed but not overly crisp artwork, and excellent soundtracks whose only downside is repetition after a while. But if the quality is similar, the content is quite different. In The Secrets of Spooky Manor, Mortimer visits his uncle’s old mansion, now haunted by ghosts. These are more the “lost soul” sorts of spirits, so there’s nothing particularly creepy about them, and the atmosphere is all done in a faux-scary way as you move through the various floors and rooms of the house. The Time Paradox, on the other hand, breaks out of this one-location confinement in a big way, sending players not only far and wide, but back in time as well. A series of portals have been opened that threaten the space-time continuum, and this time it’s up to Mortimer to visit such periods as the age of the Vikings, the French Revolution, and the American Midwest to find eight missing artifacts and construct a time bomb to close the portals for good. Needless to say, this premise affords much greater diversity of locations, but the consistency and coziness give the first game its own unique charms.

Besides the abundant reliance on hidden object gameplay, if there’s one aspect of the Mortimer Beckett games that prevents them from really reaching adventure-like status, it’s the lack of any kind of story development. Sure, each has a basic framework driving it, but there’s nothing to call an actual plot. You’re simply searching for lots of little items that will lead to the one or two meta-items on each level that will allow you to continue pursuing your final goal. When finished, rinse and repeat. This isn’t so much a criticism as a simple statement of fact to measure expectations accordingly. Don’t go in looking for story and you won’t be disappointed. Casual game fans surely won’t be disappointed in any case, as both The Secrets of Spooky Manor (also available for Nintendo Wii) and The Time Paradox are among the better seek-and-find games on the market today. They’re easy to get into and hard to put down, and offer just enough of a unique twist to make them stand out from the crowd of other similar games.

Next up: Samantha Swift...