Ravenhearst

Microsoft Windows (also available for Macintosh)

Can you spot the items in the list?

Ravenhearst (full title Mystery Case Files: Ravenhearst) is one entry in the fairly new category of casual games (games that can be played off and on a few minutes at a time; games that don't require a huge time investment, like games such as Oblivion or World of Warcraft do). As a casual game, Ravenhearst is just about perfect. You can stop at almost anytime and play as long or as short as you like. The various games contained within the meta-game are also easy to pick up and entertaining.

Ravenhearst is based on a fictional mysterious mansion in England, and the Queen herself (yes, really, as the game likes to point out) has tasked you, a novice gumshoe, to unravel its mysteries (I may get some of the backstory wrong here, since I didn't actually read any manual, but one of the great things about casual games is that you don't have to; at least that's the general jist of it). Part of a former inhabitant of the mansion has recently been uncovered, and the queen wants you to use and whatver you can find in the mansion to unravel the mystery.

I found everything but the wooden fork

There are three main minigames to Ravenhearst. The first and most predominant is a "Search and Find" for various rooms in the mansion. Some rooms of the mansion are initially accessible, but many remain locked. For open ones, you may enter and search for items that will yield clues. The owner of the mansion was a ravenous collector and collected valuable items, but also tons of junk. Every room and several outdoors locations are crammed with this stuff. Searching among the piles of items, you have the find the specific items presented to you in a list. For example, in the pantry you might be asked to find a beetle, bellows, a clothespin, a tea kettle, a mouse, a violin, an African mask, a bone and a drum. I'm not going to lie: finding some of this stuff is downright hard. The designers did a really good job of hiding pieces and making them blend in with everything else. But once I found an item I often thought to myself, "it was right in front of me! Why didn't I see it earlier?" So they don't obfuscate stuff to make them unrecognizable, but often they may show only part of an item, and you have to surmize the rest of it. For example, the saw may just show the handle and you have to recognize that it is a saw handle, even though you can't see the actual sawblade.

Some of these totally stumped me and that's where the game's hint system came to the rescue. For each "chapter" (more on that later), you're given a finite number of hints you can use (you get about six). For this minigame, the game briefly highlights a small area of the room with a spinning circle showing you the general location of the item. This is usually enough to find the item in question. I used almost everyone of these until I realized that you don't have to find every item in each location: you only need to find most. For example, you may be able to find a total of 48 items across all the rooms, but you only need to find 44 of them. So you can comfortably skip the ones you absolutely cannot find. Skipping from one room to another is easy. Once I realized this was possible, I enjoyed the game much more. Once you find enough items, you are automatically brought to the next minigame, using your "Crime Computer" to solve a puzzle.

Even though piecing together puzzles like this one are a rather small part of the game, there are plenty of them to be solved.

The next game consists of assembling a picture from various torn peices of paper, much like a jigsaw puzzle. You can see what the resulting picture is supposed to look like, so, actually, it is much easier than a real jigsaw puzzle. Each peice has part of the picture on it and you can drag them around and rotate them. You can only rotate them to ninety degrees at a time, but I see this as a strength rather than a weakness. Remember, this is a casual game, not a brain buster. This minigame is fun, and I think it wouldn't nearly as fun or "causal" if it were much harder.

Actually how you know which items you need to find in which locations and how they yeild the various scraps of paper is never adequetly explained in the game. But it doesn't have to be. Like The Seventh Guest, the backstory is just an excuse for the various minigames and puzzles—they really don't need a logical explanation.

Solving the jigsaw puzzle minigame reveals a new chapter in Emma Ravenhearst's diary. What unfolds is a creepy and engaging story of romance, love and...? (you'll have to play it if you want to find out).

Solving the puzzle reveals a new set of rooms to search and items to find. Some rooms, however, are barred by quizzacle locks that often turn out to be Rube Goldberg type mechanisms. You have to figure out which button to press or which do-dad to move in order to get the key to the lock. These puzzles are some of the most challenging of the game and it isn't often obvious what it even is you're supposed to do. But the hint mechanism works for these puzzles too, giving you a nudge in the right direction if you have no idea what to do.

The music and sound effects for this game are just about perfect, providing an eerie backdrop for the puzzles. The writing for the diary entries also seem period correct—Victorian-era England. The story is revealed at just the right pace to keep your interest.

My only gripe with the game has to do with installation. After I initially installed this game, I thought it required the CD to play, like most commercial games do. So I inserted it every time I played. But I was suprised to find that I had to install the game every time I wanted to play! I didn't understand this—I knew it wasn't un-installing itself every time I quit playing. The game just quit, it didn't thrash the hard drive around like it was trying to clean up after itself. So why did I have to install it every time I played? So once I tried clicking on the game icon without first inserting the CD. And, of course, it started right up. Apparently, being a "casual game," Ravenhearst doesn't require the CD each time you play (that's not casual man). While I laud this feature, I wish the game would've told me the game was already installed and didn't need to be installed again. It would've initially saved me a lot of time.

My only other gripe is that the conclusion is a little anti-climactic. It fits in style with the rest of the game, but, personally, I would've preferred something a little more frightening. Even so, it scared the pants off my twelve year-old son. I guess you could say the ending was very "casual." Also, I would've preferred a little more explanation of what happened in the mansion. Some things are hinted at, and you can infer what transpired, but they are never completely substantiated.

All in all, I think Ravenhearst is a good game, and works well as a casual game. At almost any point you can quit and come back later and your progress will automatically be saved. You can easily switch from it to another application and back again. And the meta-game backstory is nicely paced to keep your interest. And it works well as a multi-player game. I played with my two sons and we worked together on all of the minigames—there's enough to do for everyone. I look forward to the next installment in this series (there are two previous installments in the Mystery Case Files series) of compelling casual games.