Mystery Case Files: Ravenhearst®

Love the story line

Endearingly primitive. The game's graphical fidelity makes it a difficult recommend, and the lock puzzles can be frustratingly unintuitive, but the hidden object games themselves are fun, plentiful, and decently challenging. The story is sadly disconnected from any actual gameplay, save the jigsaw puzzles, but it's serviceable. Definitely worth a couple bucks if you prefer the HOPs over other logic puzzles.

The gameplay loop for this game has you looking for "clues" (objects) across the mansion and as you find enough of them you will find pages from the diary, and you put the pieces back together jigsaw puzzle style. Every couple of pages you will come across a puzzle door that opens up a new room and those are pretty fun to figure out. The game time I have on record is one play through. The story is interesting and kept me wanting to go through it. It auto-saves which is nice and you can set it into a cozier mode with a shorter timer so when you suck like me you can actually finish without running out of time. It also has 5 hints per section and these will work both in the hidden object areas and the puzzle lock areas. This game is really old and it shows. It is stuck at 800x600 and really messes up my monitor resolution on my secondary monitor when it goes into full screen, and tabbing out switches the resolution back again, and it's just a tedious process. Windowed it is way too small to see anything and it doesn't come with a zoom like a new game would. It also doesn't work with borderless gaming to put it into borderless window mode. It doesn't always shut down all the way after exiting the game and I have to press the quit game button in steam as well. Unlike some other reviewers I did not have any issues getting it to full screen - it did not cut anything off, it just made my other monitor unusable. I am going to say not recommended because depending on PC setup this might not work at all and I wouldn't want someone to pay full price and have it not work, but if you get it while a collection is on sale and you like this kind of gameplay loop it might be fine. I got it in a bundle with the other Mystery Case File games.