Mortimer Beckett and the Secrets of Spooky Manor Review by Meryl

Mortimer Beckett and the Secrets of Spooky Manor completely captivated me from the first puzzle. This kind of game is what I’ve been looking for since reviewing Mystery Case Files: Ravenhearst and Azada. Both games contain puzzles where players pick up or move pieces to make something happen. In these games, the puzzles are more of a guest star. In Secrets of Spooky Manor, the puzzles become the star. Only one drawback: It’s too short!

Players take over the role of Mortimer Beckett whose eccentric uncle has disappeared. You receive a letter from Uncle Jerome explaining that someone stole his device and you need to come to his haunted manor to find parts of the device’s starter to re-assemble it.

Each puzzle requires finding hidden objects — but not the normal way you see in most games. And this is NOT yet another hidden object game. Instead, you must find the pieces of the hidden object. A clock, for instance, could have four pieces for finding in the scene before the object appears in your inventory. Every scene hides the pieces of four objects, which boosts the challenge and cuts the predictability.

After reuniting all the pieces to recreate the objects, you can either go to the other rooms to find the rooms’ objects, try to solve the puzzle or place an object that belongs in the scene such as a putting a chess piece back on its chessboard. While nothing happens in object placement, it keeps the boredom away and makes solving the puzzle more challenging as you can’t easily figure out which piece goes where.

Some objects belong in other rooms or the current room needs something from another room. For example, if you see an object needs turning off or on and your inventory contains nothing to fix this, it’s obvious the needed object hides in another room. So, I hunt down the missing objects in all of the rooms; do the item placement followed by puzzle solving. However, you might run into situations where this won’t work because you need an object from another room before you can find all the objects in the current room. The thing to do, for me anyway, is to just seek out all of the objects within a reasonable time and work from there. You interact with ghosts in some of the puzzles. These aren’t your typical ghosts like Casper the Friendly Ghost or the dude on the Ghostbusters cover, but people who look transparent.

When the one-hour free trial ended, I was over halfway through the game. I thought there was more to it and I hadn’t seen it yet, but that wasn’t the case. I forgive a shorter game because of the effort that goes into creating something with little repetition — but a Mortimer Beckett game can stand to last longer than two or three hours.

Creating a game with a variety of puzzles takes more time than simply throwing objects into scenes for hidden object games. Nevertheless, I hope the Mortimer Beckett and the Time Paradox, its sequel (no date announced anywhere), will last longer and provide as much delight as Secrets of Spooky Manor. Heck, I hope the developer plans at least two sequels! Unless you don’t like puzzles, finding things and solving things — download Mortimer Beckett and the Secrets of Spooky Manor ASAP.

System Requirements: Windows

We give Mortimer Beckett and the Secrets of Spooky Manor a 4.5/5 diamond rating

• Windows ME/98/2000/XP/Vista
• 800MHz or faster processor
• 128 MB RAM (512 MB for Vista)
• DirectX 9.0 or later