Nightfall Mysteries: Curse Of The Opera

The hidden object games genre has always been full of creepy, mysterious, often dark with little being clear stories. Nightfall Mysteries: Curse Of The Opera developed and published by Vast Studios is one of those.

You are to solve the mystery of the things going on with your troupe in a current location.

To say that the place where you find yourself is weird is to say almost nothing.

As the lowly stagehand, it falls to you to solve the troupe's many problems, not the least of which is the fact that someone is killing them. You'll do this by searching various locations in town for necessary items, like pliers to fix the phone or a crowbar to pry boards off a window.

Sometimes you'll have to solve a hidden object scene before you can net your prize, and these are well assembled and beautifully hand-drawn.

If you need a nudge in the right direction  (which you might - in at least one instance, the item on the list didn't seem to match the item it was referencing at all), you can rely on the game's rechargeable hints.

Don't worry if you're squeamish; despite being chock full of dead bodies, the only gruesome thing in Curse of the Opera is the attitude of the people in your theater company. The diva is, well, a diva, but the other members are just as unpleasant, self-absorbed, and obnoxious. To be honest, it's kind of surprising that no-one's killed them before now.

You'll do a lot of backtracking through the town, revisiting locations several times, which can get a bit tiresome. Not helping the feeling of deja vu is the fact that in one instance, I had to look for the exact same list of items that I had to find the first time I'd been through that part of time.

Curse of the Opera sprinkles a few adventure game elements in among the item searches. You'll frequently need to find specific items in order to make forward progress, and your journal is always quite clear about what you need and where you should go to look for it. Less frequent, but far trickier, are the puzzles the game throws in your way.

The game is dark but challenging, attractive and carefully developed for the genre fans.

digg it! | del.icio.us