It's definitely not worth approaching as something to beat, and for goodness sakes don't consider trying to engage with the story. It really is a casual game, designed to be played for a short burst. As you play, you'll encounter each of the seventeen screens a great many times, and find yourself solving the same puzzles far too often.
Which is not a great atmosphere to have in a game that's going to have you repeat everything five million times. While everything is clear enough, it also looks grainy and slightly cheap. If only they could have been a much higher resolution. The huge disadvantage, however, is the quality of the backgrounds. It changes how you approach the game, of course, and slows you down slightly, but soon it feels right enough.
Randomly tapping on the screen is considered cheating, so the game will penalise your score if you do, but there's never any confusion between scrolling and tapping, so you never get an unfair punishment for looking around. As things would be too tiny to see if the whole location were visible at once, things zoom right in letting you swish around with the stylus.
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The DS version's most distinct difference from its PC origin is the scrolling screen. (You can always use the hints, but they're for wimps.) It saves you from going too mad, as you somehow fail to spot a hummingbird in a caf. The advantage of multiple locations is taking a break from staring at one screen and starting afresh on another. There's a certain number of objects total that must be found, with completists given the option to hunt them all down if so desired. We'll soon have this murder solved once I've found the wax seal and the door knocker!Īs you progress through the nonsensical story about suspects, thieves, and leads (all told through dull text onscreen), you're given access to a number of locations at once. Once everything has been found - perhaps along with each level's optional key and brush, which unlock mini-games - you reach the puzzle screen where you'll be asked to do something ridiculously simple like a 25-piece jigsaw, or moving tiles to match the background, picture pairs, and even a peculiar (by which I mean wrong) version of Mah-jongg. You'd be amazed how hard it can be to spot a telephone when it's the size of a tree. This might be through camouflage, or through ludicrous scale. Instead they've been placed onto the background image in devious ways to help them vanish from your eye. Importantly, things aren't hidden logically. Ding! Each object vanishes from the scene and is crossed out on your list. It's that constant hammering on the satisfaction button as you tap on the third frog, and then spot the umbrella along the top bar of the lamppost. Think Where's Wally, but with dozens of things to find and none of them wearing stupid hats. Against all reason, this most simplistic and ridiculous of notions is oddly gratifying.
Such laborious use of quotation marks is pretty necessary here, since all you ever do throughout is hunt busy images for items on the list, then solve a simple puzzle, and repeat, forever. Indeed, many of the same screens are used, this time to "tell the story" of an art theft that you're "investigating". games on PC, The Lottery Ticket and The Vegas Heist, and Portrait of a Thief borrows very heavily from the former.
PopCap has previously done a couple of Mystery P.I. That sort of thing seems perfect for the DS, and it's surprising there haven't been hundreds already. a hidden object game in which you're tasked with finding particular objects in an extremely cluttered scene. Its version of the Mystery Case File games began with Mystery P.I. It was and still is a clone-based market, and few are better at producing successful incarnations than PopCap. Casual games used to fall into three camps: the Bejeweled clone, the Diner Dash clone, and the Mystery Case File clone.