Haunted Manor: Lord of Mirrors Collector's Edition

Today Big Fish Games offers you to enlarge your hidden object collection with its all-new game under the quite pompous title Haunted Manor: Lord of Mirrors Collector’s Edition. As it is a game of hidden object genre, get ready to dive into a gloomy atmosphere, where numerous puzzles wait for you. Your chief task is to help Stan Riddle escape the Haunted Manor.

Despite the pomposity of the project, it turns out to be rather ordinary premise in its genre. The first disappointment comes when we understand that it is a series of rooms with shabby tasks, not a game with an intriguing storyline that you progress through. After a while you practically pay no attention to the dialogues or plot and race rooms by rooms as it is absolutely obvious what to expect. To make things worse, Haunted Manor: Lord of Mirrors Collector’s Edition is incredibly easy - items is easy to find, puzzles has no challenge, and the great part of the gameplay is devoted to such “difficult” tasks as lighting lamps, lanterns, candles and dusting off mirrors to get to the next location. Would like to be a cleaner?

In our opinion the great problem of all adventure games is that they are all starting become pretty routine. They all seem to have the same kind of gameplay - putting torn pieces of paper together, finding keys to unlock doors or so, searching for the differences, and so on and so forth. All these ordinary tasks you have to solve while playing Haunted Manor: Lord of Mirrors Collector’s Edition. No even a hint on originality! Another title’s pet peeve is hidden object scenes that you return to and the things often found are back in place.   

However, it would be unfair to write off Haunted Manor: Lord of Mirrors Collector’s Edition altogether because of these shortcomings, though. The graphics are perfect, the music is fine, and you can click through dialogues, no timer, plenty of hints. If you are not sure about this title and do not want to pay big money for rubbish, you’d better wait for regular edition.

26, March 2010