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6.2 sorta fun
If you thought, as did I, that the Jack the Ripper craze of a few years ago had finally died down, then we were both wrong. Casual games are doing more for unsolved famous crimes than all the dime store novels of the seventies combined. Who knows, maybe in a hundred years we'll see virtual reality hidden object games about JonBenét Ramsey?
Real Crimes: Jack the Ripper, from Virtual Playground and Gamers Digital, is a simple hidden object game about Chief Constable Melville Macnaghten's investigation of the "Jack the Ripper" murders. Promoted to Chief Constable of the Metropolitan Police Service in 1890, Macnaghten used his access to police case notes to write his own report on the murders, which by 1890 were a few years old. (Eleven murders made up the so-called "Whitechapel murders," however this game focuses on the five known as the "canonical five" - those generally agreed to have been carried out by Jack the Ripper.)
I'm no expert on Jack the Ripper, but I have read Patricia Cornwell's Portrait of a Killer, even though true crime books are about as interesting to me as those movies of the week where someone is dying of cancer and invariably a kid yells "I hate you!" at one or both of his parents. In fact if I found a genie I'd wish those movies out of existence! But that seems unlikely. Anyway, one reads strange things like Patricia Cornwell and John Grisham when stuck in a foreign country with few books available in one's native language.
With the help of his genius scientific adviser Sir Francis Galton, Macnaghten visits the five murder scenes and follows the clues he finds to additional locations and various suspects. Each location is a hidden object scene, with ten or more items presented in a list on the left side of the screen. Find and click on each one within the scene to remove it. Find them all and it's on to the next scene. Most objects are completely random and have little to nothing to do with the investigation. However, one or two will lead the pair of investigators to a new scene or suspect. Interviews with suspects are carried out in dialogue boxes that you click through without interaction, and there are no voiceovers.
In the timed mode of play, you only have a limited time available to find all objects in a scene, or to solve a puzzle. If the seconds run out, you'll have to start again. For the impatient or laid back players who like to get up from the game every now and then and stretch their legs, a special untimed "rookie mode" is available.
Galton was one of the first proponents of fingerprints as a forensic science, and fittingly hidden in each scene of Jack the Ripper are five fingerprints. Each one you find adds thirty seconds of time to the countdown timer, adding to your stint at that location. Disappointingly, the game is off-the-wall strict about random clicking! Every wrong click subtracts ten seconds from the timer! This is ridiculously draconian in a hidden object game with an 800x600 resolution where objects are often fuzzy... or there are multiple notebooks or platters or whatever in a scene and you're not sure which one the game wants you to click on!
If you can't find an object or simply don't know what it is, you can click on Macnaghten's police badge for a hint. You only have a certain number of badges to expend, but every scene also contains an extra police badge for you to find. Hint: "calipers," of which there are many in the game, are simply compasses (you know, that tool used to draw a circle).
Breaking up the many hidden object game scenes are various puzzles. They run the gamut from memory games to jigsaw puzzles, from spot the difference between two images to slide puzzles, and more. They're all skippable, so if you get stuck on a particularly fiendish puzzle you can just click and bypass it.
Hidden object games come in two categories: those that go the extra mile to make all the cluttered items look like they're actually in the scene (in actual realistic size and perspective), and those that just paste a bunch of random clip art onto a background image, fade and blur a few of them, and call it a day. Jack the Ripper employs both methods, as if the designers got halfway through laying out the jumbled array in the various rooms and began panicking. "Oh no, we've got to get this game released! Hey you, here's ten bucks: go down to Best Buy and get one of those clipart collections, pronto!" Objects are frequently reused and every sky and ceiling is plastered with alphaed hidden objects. Surprisingly, only a few anachronisms are present.
I found the music fairly forgettable; in fact all I recall of it, moments after playing, is a slightly startling dramatic stinger that pops up during the soundtrack rotation.
The final verdict: Real Crimes: Jack the Ripper is a rather pedestrian hidden object game with low resolution screens and occasionally fuzzy graphics. I can't recommend it to anyone but hidden object game fanatics.
Finally, a hint! If you're stuck on the Chapman barbershop key/lock puzzle, see the screenshot to the left. The skeleton keys must be inserted in the pictured order, from top to bottom. If you place a color out of order you'll have to restart from the beginning.
Download Real Crimes: Jack the Ripper
I predict that quite a few of the creators of this game will meet the same strange fates as a bunch of biologists who died within the past decade. Should they somehow survive, I’d love to check it out though.