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7.4 excellent
Remember when CBS moved their hit Sunday night hourlong Murder, She Wrote to Thursdays at 8:00pm to compete with Friends? If you don't, then perhaps like me you were never a fan of Jessica Fletcher, the mystery novelist who solved murders in her spare time. (I always thought Murder, She Wrote and Matlock were for oldsters.) Well, Murder, She Wrote is back in hidden object game form!
Murder, She Wrote: The Game, from Mystery Studios and Legacy Interactive, is a fairly faithful recreation of Angela Lansbury's long-running TV series. You play as Jessica Fletcher, a small town crime novelist and criminologist who stumbles upon dead bodies wherever she goes (usually about her business in Cabot Cove, Maine). Perhaps based on Agatha Christie's Ms. Marple or Adriadne Oliver, Jessica gets to the bottom of mysteries by snooping around and cleverly putting clue and clue together. In this hidden object game version, snooping of course means searching various locations for an assortment of mostly random hidden objects, with just a few clues mixed in.
The game contains five separate mysteries, each about as long as and containing about as many characters (and red herrings) as a typical hour in the TV series.
At every hidden object scene, Jessica is given a list of hidden objects to find in the scene. A typewritten list, of course. One unique and kind of fun twist is that all the vowels are missing from the words in the list, because Jessica dropped those typewriter keys in the scene and must recover them. A, E, I, O, U, and sometimes Y. The word CR___N might be on her list. Find the "A" key and it becomes CRA__N. Find the "O" key and it changes to CRA_ON. That's still kind of tricky. Finally, clicking on the "Y" reveals it as a CRAYON. You don't need to find the typewriter keys to collect hidden objects, but since they're round and generally easy to spot, it becomes second nature to click on all six of them immediately.
(Curiously, in the game Jessica uses a unique typewriter keyboard layout that is missing the letter "N." I'm no novelist but I bet it takes unusual skill to write a mystery novel without using a single N!)
Some items in her list, those enclosed by quotation marks, are actions that she must complete. For example, feeding fish to a very hungry seagull (so that it flies away, revealing a clue where it was perched). Every scene also contains an item or two typed in blue ink. These require some sort of interaction before they can be collected. Jessica might have to dip a sponge inside a bucket of soapy water and then clean the glass of a display case to reveal its contents, for example.
If you get stuck, you can click on a blank piece of paper from Jessica's typewriter for a hint. A new paper slowly feeds through, so you'll have to wait for the typewriter to recharge before you receive any more assistance. Luckily, each scene also contains a new typewriter ribbon. Find it for an instant hint recharge - in fact, you should wait until you need it before clicking on it, otherwise you'll waste its recharge power.
There are a number of puzzles to solve in between hunting for hidden objects. Jigsaw puzzles, memory games, spot the difference puzzles, logic challenges, and so on. Some are more pertinent to the mystery than others.
Murder, She Wrote contains quite a few cutscenes - many more than most hidden object games released these days. These intermissions are just slightly animated with sliding static images, but all are voiced over. Actors and actresses from the TV show and TV movies are absent, of course, but their replacements (Phoebe Moyer in the case of Angela Lansbury) are quite good so no complaints there. The graphics that matter most, inside the hidden object rooms, aren't bad... but I found some objects a tad bit fuzzy. This isn't the kind of game you can enjoy with the glare of the sun on the corner of your monitor.
Hearing the familiar opening theme is very exciting, in a "I used to hear this on my TV fifteen years ago and now it's on my computer!" kind of way.