Puzzles prevent access to certain rooms and – given the complete lack of information about the task that you’re facing – they can be taxing indeed.
Mystery Case Files: Ravenhearst does try to do a couple of things a little differently though, and it’s to the developer’s credit that it's even tried to mix things up where a less scrupulous team wouldn’t have bothered. In one room you need to find a fortune cookie and an orange slice (among other things) and selecting something that looks for all the world as if it is indeed that evasive orange slice ends up giving you a check mark against “fortune cookie”. Only two levels of zoom are available (“zoomed” and “not zoomed”), so you’ll have your face about an inch from the screen for a lot of your playing time - and even when that’s the case, some items are barely recognisable for what they apparently are. In some cases, the limited resolution of the images can cause you to miss things that you’re looking for, too. There’s very little logic to any of the “hidden object” parts of this hidden object game and that does nothing but cause confusion. A pair of shears might just be hanging in the sky. A machine gun can be found in the right angle between the ceiling and the wall, apparently held up by nothing. Items appear in the most ridiculous of places, too.
Essentially, we were looking for the 10-pixel high dark line that made up the gap in the pin, as that’s all that was visible. We couldn’t find it because it was beige in colour, and was placed in front of something else that was all but identically coloured. In one area where you’re asked to find a clothes pin for example, we searched for a good 20 minutes, eventually giving up and using one of the limited supply of assists to find it for us. The unfortunate truth of it all though is that a lot of the time, you may have trouble finding one or two items, but there’s a good chance that it isn’t your fault. You’ll spend most of your time with the game in these rooms, scrolling around, trying to hunt down that final item from a list of entirely unrelated bits and pieces.
Each room is portrayed by a single image that contains hundreds of items that are splashed about all over the place. Diary entries are unlocked by successfully completing jigsaw puzzles, which are made available by finding the required number of items throughout the manor’s various rooms within a set time limit. To do this, you must piece together the details by unlocking the diary entries of Miss Emma Ravenhearst. Without giving any of the story away, Ravenhearst Manor is the setting, and as a detective it’s your job to get to the bottom of a troubling case.
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