Danse Macabre: Deadly Deception Collector's Edition

[h1]Short version: 75%[/h1] Danse Macabre 3 has almost everything: gorgeous art, fluid hidden object gameplay, and an exciting murder mystery. However, it is also very short with only a handful of hidden object scenes, some of which with questionable quality. [h1]Long version:[/h1] Danse Macabre 3: Deadly Deception moves its setting to the United States but otherwise it follows the theme of the series: it takes place in the early days of the 20th century and involves a murder investigation tied to the entertainment industry. In this case, our story starts at a boarding school where we deduce that the victim is not who we think she is, which eventually leads to a rather unusual culprit and motivation, at least within HOG standards. Although Eipix added the usual amount of extra content, the main story is woefully short. Similarly, the excellent voice acting and plot cannot fully hide the gameplay issues; there are almost no conventional puzzles and while there is a large variety in hidden object scenes, they range from effortlessly easy to annoyingly tedious. However, these are mostly comparisons to the previous entries of the series. On its own, Deadly Deception is a good HOG, it just fails to follow up an even better one.

This series is brilliant, but although this is a really good game, with luscious scenery, quirky music and well made, it is the weakest of the series. It is very short - 5 hours for the main and the bonus, there was a bug in one of the games. This is not to say that it is not head and shoulders above most HOGs, with loads of extras and as always from Eipix a how it was made video, witty credits and I loved the twist at the end of the bonus game. You always get the impression that this very creative team have a lot of fun making the games and even if not the best of this series, it is still a lot of fun to play.

At just over 3 hours this game is not worth full price so I recommend you pick it up on discount. The game file size is under 700 MB so the image resolution suffers. The story was interesting with creative illustrations and animations. For the age and resolution, it's a reasonable game.