Here's a link to The Clockwork Man: The Clockwork Man
6.0 mid-normal
Our October ghost roundup continues at Casual Explosion as we take a look at Ghost Town Mysteries: Bodie, from Gaming Hungama. Bodie is a California state park and former mining town that was abandoned about fifty years ago. What started out as a gold boom town is now just a ghost town, with 150 buildings kept in a state of "arrested decay" by the Parks Authority. Supposedly the former town is haunted by the ghost of Evelyn Byers, a little girl accidentally killed by a miner she liked to follow to and from work. Gaming Hungama took that germ of an idea and created a ghostly hidden object game using Bodie as the setting.
You start the game as a nameless ghost investigator receiving a call from your friend Ann. Like Kris Williams in Ghost Hunters, Ann has researched Bodie and asks you to join her in the small town to look into tourist reports of ghostly activity. You jump into your car and, driving like Indiana Jones, quickly arrive in the small state park. As soon as you take your car keys from the ignition, they disappear! Yikes! If that isn't proof of paranormal activity, I don't know what is! That would be the point where I'd hoof it back the way I came down the road. But you're a professional. And so begins your investigation into the death of cute little Evelyn Byers.
As the legend goes, there were twelve witnesses to the crime, and all suffered mysterious fatalities just before they could release a map they had drawn pointing to the murderer. (Remember to keep your suspension of disbelief inside the vehicle at all times.) Not only that, but the twelve witnesses' tombstones have gone missing from the local cemetery. Can you restore the tombstones, the map, and solve the mystery before sundown? Not if you're scared of ghosts, you can't, because they're popping up all over the place in Bodie!
Gameplay involves searching a cluttered scene for hidden objects, just as in any other hidden object game. At the right of the screen is a list of "hidden clues" - objects that are somewhere inside the jumble and disorder of the current room and must be collected. When you find an object, clicking on it removes it from the scene (placing it in the large steamer trunk you unexplicably cart about from scene to scene) and crosses its name off your list. Once you find all the items, you can move onto the next hidden object scene or puzzle. If you get stuck and can't locate an object, some spiders that you carry around in a broken fishbowl can slide into the scene and create a web over one of the hidden items, telling you where it is. These are your hints. Unfortunately, after giving you a hint, the spider escapes. You can catch more spiders, however, by finding flies on the exteriors of the town's buildings.
Random clicking is frowned upon in Bodie, unfortunately. As president of the random clicking fan club (RCFC) I thought surely by 2009 we had seen the end of these penalties. But I was wrong. Too many bad clicks and the screen will go black and white for a few seconds, during which none of your clicks count.
When you finish each building in Bodie, a canvas bag filled with crumbled bits of tombstone will drop into the room. Lugging it back to the cemetery, you'll be treated with a rather difficult puzzle as you try to put the tombstone back into one piece. In this puzzle, pieces can be rotated ninety degrees, making the task quite challenging. The further into the game you get, the more pieces start off in the wrong orientation. Hint: look for edge lines and the continuation of patterns in the pieces you've already successfully placed. Selecting a piece of the tombstone makes it bigger while you're sliding it around, so even if you don't know where it goes you can take a look at it in closer detail. The owner of the tombstone will do his or her best to scare you during the puzzle. Boo!
Regrettably, these puzzles and others in the game (an amazingly difficult spot the differences puzzle, for example) cannot be skipped and you're given no hints. If you're the kind of player who generally skips hard puzzles and is just along for the hidden object scenes, you might find Bodie quite frustrating, indeed.
After restoring the tombstone, you'll be asked to find some carvings on it, and then in a moment straight out of Carrie you'll be given the key to the house of the next witness... and your investigation continues...
Ghost Town Mysteries: Bodie is quite a mixed bag when it comes to presentation. On the one hand, the artwork isn't too bad and the full motion video scenes are smooth. However the game's 800x600 resolution is soo 2004. There are a few objects that are quite simply discouraging to hunt for at such a stingy resolution. Perhaps it's fortunate that many, many of the same objects are reused between scenes. The sound design, on the other hand, is definitely above average. Perhaps it overplays the ghostly cries and haunted house footsteps, but this isn't a subtle game meant to unnerve you, it's all up in your face like Halloween night.
And for a game whose tagline is "Real Ghost Towns. Real Ghosts," I expected a little more reality.
Download Ghost Town Mysteries: Bodie
I loved it i thought it was a great game i accually looked for it at walmart last night lol.
I’ve heard that a version with more hints and clearer art is about to hit the web….
The games’ spooky as hell. If you wanna get the Halloween spirit from your dinner table to your pc, this is the right game for it! I just downloaded the free trial from iwin and am hooked! The music and the vo are pretty nice, but I found the game to be bit on the darker side, well, maybe it’s because the storyline is do damn spooky! One big flaw is the hint system, where the player has to wait for some time to get the hints..