I love games where they make me feel part of the story by letting me interact with the scene and its objects. Such stories contain puzzles where anything goes and you find them in Azada, Dream Chronicles and Mortimer Beckett and the Secrets of Spooky Manor. Artfully illustrated Natalie Brooks – Secrets of Treasure House comes with a game full of puzzles for solving and a few hidden object scenes.

As Natalie Brooks, players inherit her grandmother’s house only to find that the city plans to move or destroy the house to make room for its new road. Natalie starts a petition to help keep her grandmother’s house where it belongs and discovers the house has secrets of its own as well as some of the city’s citizens. Natalie learns she can trust no one.

Natalie’s story appears in comic strip format between scenes and in her conversations with people she meets in her unexpected adventure. The story captivates, but typos and imperfect grammar detract from the story at times.

Players need to pick up objects to add them to the inventory. These objects work together or with items in the scene to solve a puzzle whether it’s to open a safe or build something. Natalie also keeps notes in her notebook, but they don’t come in handy.

While the playing beguiles for a few hours — two sittings at most — the game has serious flaws. It feels like the developers wanted to make a deadline regardless if the game is complete. Solving the puzzles to make something happen almost satisfies though the story and some of the game don’t come together.

For example, scattered postcard pieces appear throughout the game. Nothing comes of them. Natalie Brooks – Secrets of Treasure House ends without a reference to those postcards. What’s the point? To offer a mini-game without purpose? No, it needs to have a purpose. Another time, I copy down a series of numbers for later use. The code never has relevance.

The incomplete postcard mini-game is one of many issues that caused the game to surprise me with its abrupt ending. It reminds me of Lost — more questions than answers, but everything in the TV show has a purpose (supposedly).

Natalie comments on things players click. That’s another annoyance – the first time she tells us, it’s fine. But she repeats it every time we click near the item in trying to find nearby things. I understand people miss the commentary on the first click and want to see it again. There has to be a more effective way to do this. Funny, I miss a few comments (because I accidentally clicked the screen to make it go away) and couldn’t bring the game to repeat itself.

Natalie Brooks – Secrets of Treasure House includes a few scenes that let you find hidden objects to gain bonus hints. These scenes appear in the first half of the game only to never be seen again. This makes the game feel uneven. The hidden object scenes should show up evenly throughout the game.

Some scenes come with a mini-game. For instance, one calls for a slingshot where you need to make all the circles light up to open the cage. I find the slingshot and look for something to use with the slingshot until my eyes hurt.

Stupid me. I click the slingshot and the target — the game automatically gives me what I need to shoot at the target. Yet in other similar games, I collect the “bullets” myself. So inconsistency is another problem.

Some scenes and puzzles are easy while a couple of them trick me. I think experienced gamers might call this one easy, but I’m glad I played the game despite its incompleteness.

Games in this genre tend to run short because of the work that goes in creating original puzzles as opposed to repetitive puzzles (hidden objects, match three, etc.). Natalie Brooks – Secrets of Treasure House isn’t the shortest, but it could stand a little more game play.

The “little faster than classical” and “slower than rock” sound fits the game’s atmosphere. It isn’t my favorite, but that’s a personal opinion and not a judgment of the sound quality. The attractive illustration engages and wows.

Flaws aside, Natalie Brooks – Secrets of Treasure House doesn’t feel like a waste of time. Its blending of wonderful art and a variety of puzzles prove entertaining.

Try Natalie Brooks – Secrets of Treasure House.

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

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