February 22, 2008
Cate West: The Vanishing Files, new hidden object game
Cate West is an author with psychic abilities. When she touches certain items, she forms a sense of their context and meaning within a bigger picture. When the police discover her abilities they request her help in solving mysteries. With that set-up for Cate West: The Vanishing Files we’re ready to tag along as Cate searches for clues, builds cases and identifies guilty suspects.
The artwork is bright, colorful and cluttered. I couldn’t figure out at first what bothered me about the way the first hidden object screen is presented, but then it registered. There’s no cleverness at all to the way hidden objects are placed in several of the screens. It appears that someone took a picture and just pasted a bunch of objects all over it, making no attempt to blend them in and create some semblance of normalcy in the overall picture.
I suspect that this game is the result of a collaborative effort (surely most of them are?) and that the creators of some of the later screens that I played were more experienced than whoever made the first one. Objects are more cleverly placed and the scenes are more cohesive.
There’s a twist on the standard presentation of the split-screen, find-the-differences minigame in Cate West. Instead of just locating differences, the player is required to place missing items back into each of the two scenes. The object of the games hasn’t changed, but the extra step adds a little fun to the same old/same old.
Another minigame that makes several appearances requires the player to find pieces of clues that have been chopped up and scattered around the scenery. We’ve seen it before in other games, and done better. Pieces were too obviously placed to offer any challenge in locating them. Some of the other minigames are more engaging. After several rounds of hidden object and minigame play, suspects and clues are presented and the player must decide which should be arrested. Another minigame is presented during the trial. I liked the variety of games and play presented, keeping standard gameplay from becoming monotonous.
I downloaded Cate West: The Vanishing Files from SpinTop Games for a free hour of play. They’ll sell you the full version for $19.99. Despite some problems, I liked the game. The storyline is engaging and makes sense (something lacking in many hidden object games.) Some of the gameplay was challenging, but inconsistencies abound in the overall quality. While I don’t think it’s ready to cash in a burial policy I don’t like it well enough to shell out twenty bucks. I might buy it for $6.99 when Big Fish starts offering it. We’ll see.
You can see all of my hidden object game reviews by selecting the games category from the drop-down menu in my left sidebar. Each review contains a link to a source for downloading the game.
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February 23rd, 2008 at 1:16 am, Muhd Imran Says:
My son will love solving games and puzzles on the PC. Strangely enough, I don’t.
Unlike my friends who spend quite an amount of time playing PC Games into the wee hours of the night, I spend the same amount of time blogging more than surfing, very seldom on games at all.
Have a good weekend.
February 23rd, 2008 at 10:42 am, skeet Says:
I spend entirely too much time playing games and blogging, Imran. I’ve been forcing myself to do “other things” for several hours each day lest I turn into a total sociophobe, lol!
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