point and click adventures

welcome to the nostalgia zone

i never had a chance, man - growing up in the late nineties with The Learning Company edutainment, being a tween in the 2000s during the golden age of Nancy Drew mysteries... i love me a point and click.

i'm not sure exactly how i'm going to lay out this page yet, but for now i'll be writing about some recent indie and vintage games i've picked up. a proper shrine to the Nancy Drew mysteries is on the to-do list as well.

art of murder: the secret files (2009)

picked this up on Steam for a dollar. it's gloriously shitty in all the ways i love in a hidden object game, and old enough that i had to change a graphics setting to be able to play it.

we play the FBI's finest, Nicole Bonnet, as she investigates the kidnapping of a professor and the murder of his assistant. the game takes place in Mexico, which leads to some translation silliness that i was happy to pick up on. in the first scene there's a sign for 'tienda caja' which i think is a valiant attempt at translating 'package store.' we also see a map later on that has towns named 'pantalones' and 'permierda.'

during our investigation we end up fixing a neon sign and cleaning up a messy bar in order to get more information, which makes us the single most compassionate FBI agent on the planet.

a few things i liked - there's a little minigame where you gradually build up a police sketch of the murderer, which was kind of charming. the hidden object scenes had some variety (silhouette hunts, etc.). your casebook was pretty simplistic but it did actually record all of the dialogue and context given to you so that was nice.

some things i didn't like - oh man. some of the click targets were minuscule and some of the items were almost unrecognizable. the writing verged on bad a few times, but the game was made by a Polish company so i'll forgive them a couple misspellings. the storytelling did the barest minimum and ended with an abrupt cut to credits after the ending cutscene, so nothing memorable or interesting there.

got about two hours of gameplay out of this, which isn't terrible for a dollar, but i wouldn't recommend picking it up at full price unless you really appreciate nostalgic jank.

art of murder: fbi confidential (2008)

y'all i'm sorry, this one was ass and i did not finish it.

the opening cutscene was absolutely fucking bonkers, first of all. Nicole Bonnet reports for duty at what appears to be a derelict apartment building? moldy wallpaper, bloody handprint smears, and old box springs, the works. Nicole opens a door to find a man in a suit - her superior, apparently. i think his name is John? Jack? it doesn't matter. John/Jack picks a roach off his hand (?!?) as he tells Nicole that this job won't be good for her because she'll have to listen to his "frigging jokes." horror music swells as he pats Nicole on the shoulder... and tells her to go get him coffee. when she returns with the coffee, there is a gunshot, and she finds Jack/John just in time to hear his last words before he bleeds out from a gutshot. the narrative presents this as a heartwrenching loss, as if we didn't just meet this guy in a unexplained hovel.

then the game starts and you're presented with a perfectly normal office building. instead of a horror movie atmosphere there's a secretary named Ruth. i do not understand.

the gameplay is best described as a slog, a trudge even. moving around takes a while because you actually have to watch Nicole amble across the screen to whatever door you're trying to send her to. your first day goes like this:

thank gods i had already explored around and accidentally realized that the printer needed to be refilled with paper before i started this process because if i hadn't, i might have flipped a table.

no, the table flipping occurred on day two of the game, when you need to take an artifact from a museum as evidence (long story). after going back and forth getting some fucking paperwork signed and approved, then getting someone to unlock the display case, you take the artifact and realize that a little alarm goes off if the weight isn't correct. despite, like... the fact that this is evidence in an ongoing FBI investigation and that's not... that's... not how any of this works??

so you go to the museum's garden (excuse me, the Orangery) and have to find the correct pot with the correct amount of potting soil placed in it (which may be none! none potting soil!) that will trick the alarm. there are three possible pots. each one can hold up to two handfuls of dirt. you may only carry one pot at a time.

you cannot remove dirt from the pots.

you cannot remove dirt from the pots.

after a lot of trial and error, i learned that i softlocked myself on day one of the game by mindlessly filling each pot with soil expecting to plant something in them later. ragequit. might try this again much, MUCH later, but for now i'm done playing Drudgery Simulator.

mystery legends: sleepy hollow (2009)

this one is in the archive! i had to install Alcohol 120% to get it to run.

so this one is a straight up search-n-find game - no mystery, despite the title - and it's actually pretty good. twelve chapters with multiple hidden object scenes, a couple puzzles, and a few extras to collect. there are some frame stories to set up the chapters, which are fine, though they're delivered in really tortured verse.

you can see silhouettes of the items on your list, which is handy because here are some of the items:

but yeah, this one was good! recommend if you don't want all the frills and just wanna hunt for stuff. i think it took me about four hours to finish.

samantha swift and the hidden roses of athena (2008)

also on the archive - holy shit they don't make games like this for kids anymore.

this is a proper adventure game with hidden object scenes, and i fuckin loved it even though i'm pretty sure the target audience is middle schoolers. we join the titular Samantha Swift on her journey to archaeological sites around the world in search for the gifts of Athena.

just look how fucking cute this is.

my inner fourth-grader had a fabulous few hours with this. most of the items you look for actually make sense in context, the point-n-click logic is pretty sensible, and it's basically frustration-free since it tells you exactly where you need to be and if you're ready to move on.

given that the characters work for the Museum of Secrets Lost (adorable), some of the plot-irrelevant artifacts you find come home with you to grace the museum displays, which you can look at when you're done with the game. not exactly achievements, but pretty close and very cute.

highly recommend, play this alone for the nostalgia or share with the kids in your life.

(to get this to work i had to mount the file with Alcohol and then run the setup.exe through the command line - not too hard but it took some trial and error.)