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Hidden Mysteries: Buckingham Palace (DS)

Status: Finished playing
I started playing this game on Saturday 3 July, 2021  //  I stopped playing this game on: Friday 9 July, 2021
Current opinion of this game
No comment, yet.

July 9, 2021 11:50:57 AM
Finished!

In addition to the clue system there's a "just solve this" button that sometimes (why not always? I'm not sure) appears in the non-hidden object puzzles you often have to solve. I appreciated this very much for one of the puzzles! (small figures of soldiers you have to place on a mantelpiece in a specific order - I tried a few things but the answer left me mystified...

I checked the credits and it looks like the game was made by a team of fewer than ten people! How times have changed? I'm mulling over whether "hidden object games" make for good student projects. Probably not? (I mean, if students want to make them, sure...but not as an assignment/forced project)


July 7, 2021 02:17:54 PM
I'm really enjoying this - it has just the right level of difficulty for me - or perhaps I'm just better at these games now? Surprisingly there's a fair amount of "documentary" content! The game is set in Buckingham Palace and as you play you find documents and the (lost) crown jewels from way back when. I think it refers to actual gems that were lost when Oliver Cromwell(?) melted the crown jewels for reasons? Or something like that.

The game clearly has a fictional component - there's an "A.M." person who's left documents and who's trail you're sort of following. But the goal is what I'm curious if it's real (or also fictional). The documentary part comes in because the locations are (I suppose) ACTUAL locations (rooms, areas) in Buckingham palace with little historical notes of when it was decorated, who did the decorating and what it's use has been. It's interesting - and then you have to find random objects plastered over the artists rendering of that room. It also makes me wonder if the artist rendering of the rooms is based on real pictures of those rooms? (like, if you took away all the nonsense objects, do you get a decent picture of that real room with it's actual decorations and things?).

The game also has a really good clue system. You have 10 points you can spend to get clues. Each scene has two crowns you can find to get 5pts each extra, and the points reset between acts. Now, for 1 pts you are shown a silhouette of the object. For 3pts you're shown what the object looks like. For 5pts, where it is...and perhaps there's one more. So, you can scaffold yourself here! Now, if you pay 1 pt and still no luck - you still have to pay 3pts for the next clue (no discounts from having spent points already).


 
kudos for original design to Rodrigo Barria