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7.3 excellent
The local news stations where I live are always doing stories about how long the police take to respond after you dial 911. Officials never explain why the police are late, just that they're trying to improve response time and put more officers on the streets. It's easy to criticize cops, especially if like me the only dealing you've had with them is when they stopped you one night at 2am to hassle you. But maybe what the local news reporters aren't telling us is that when you dial emergency services on a dark and stormy night and the police are rushing to your aid... occasionally the officers crash their squad car into a street sign and end up spending the night in a haunted hotel.
In Haunted Hotel, from SpecialBit Games, you play just such an officer. After crashing into a hotel sign, you follow the road on foot until you arrive at the nearby structure. Immediately you begin exploring and looking for clues. The game gets right going without any sort of character development. From reading your journal, we learn that you're a police officer, you aren't very good at English (possibly English is your second language), and you hate apostrophes with an unholy and frankly frightening passion.
From just glancing at the screenshots, I'm sure you've guessed that Haunted Hotel is another in a long line of hidden object games. Your cop intuition has assembled lists of items to find in the hotel's various rooms. Click on these hidden objects one by one to remove them from the scene and scratch them off your list. Only a few rooms are open on each floor - find all their hidden objects and it's off to the next floor. Oh wait, you'll have to charge up the emergency battery in the rickety old elevator first, by playing minigames.
I've got to hand it to SpecialBit Games. They may not know their way around the English language or ghosts, but they've put together some pretty good cluttered rooms to hunt around in. In general objects don't look like they've been pasted directly into the game from a hotel clipart CD-ROM, like in so many other games. Items are well-shaded and well-aligned to the room's perspective. (Recently I was all set to review Gunnar Games' Hidden Mysteries: The Civil War but I gave up after five minutes of play because the presentation was just too lackluster for my delicate sensibilities.) In fact, I'd almost say that Haunted Hotel is too easy at times. Like 99% of hidden object games, you're given a time limit in which to complete a level, and as always that time limit is absurdly generous. In this case, it's absurdly generous times two.
There are six minigames to keep you occupied between levels. In "Ropes," you have to untangle some ropes. In "Word Machine," you magnetically grapple flying letters in midair to spell words. In the aptly named "Puzzle," you put together a jigsaw puzzle. (I did the same puzzle twice in a row - so there may be only one. If so, subtract one explosion point from Haunted Hotel's final score.) In "Code Lock" you play a Simon Says type of pattern memory game. In "Match-3" you're treated to one of the worst match-3 implementations I've ever seen. And finally there's a mystical energy minigame where you have to click on wisps of energy as they fly by you in a dusty attic crawlspace. Win that one and you get all sorts of eyebrow-raising statistics about your performance.
These minigames also pop up inside rooms when you find a clue that needs unraveling. After you complete the minigame you abruptly go back to finding the remaining hidden objects - no further mention of the clue - so I think someone made a mistake somewhere.
Marriage is a wonderful thing. My mother never... what I'm about to tell you. First... first you put your two knees close up tight. You mean, you swing them to the left? Yes. And then you swing them to the right. Oh my dear... you step around the floor kind of nice and light. And then you twist around and twist around with all of your might. Spread your lovin' arms, clear out in space. You do the Eagle Rock with style and grace. You put your left foot out, and bring it back. And that's what we call Ballin' the Jack!
The sound effects are befitting, with spooky ambient background noises like breaking glass, squeaks, and strange breezes. And a rather impressive main score patterned after the theme to The Exorcist. The game, however, is about as scary as riding through an automatic carwash.
Haunted Hotel suffers from a clunky story involving a priest, a sea captain, an engineer, a cat, and a mysterious gale of wind named Gale. It's a text-heavy game with plenty of policeman journal entries to read - none of them with apostrophes - so if you're planning to check the game out you'd better quit wasting time reading Casual Explosion and get started. SpecialBit Games have created some pretty good hidden object rooms, but everything else in Haunted Hotel is unfortunately threadbare.