Adventure Gamers - Forums

Casual Friday

The first Casual Community Playthrough featured the game Angelica Weaver - Catch Me When You Can.

It’s a detective story with Chicago providing half the location. Our protagonist is charged with solving a series of murders. Interestingly, the other half of the location is Jolly Old England where another set of murders is taking place. To add some interest, the English murder victims not only have the same last names as the Chicago murders, but they took place over 100 years ago.

Dear Angelica is apparently capable of time travel, because when she discovers a Chicago victim she is transported back in time to investigate the murder of the similarly-named English victim. (It’s tempting to call this Victorian England because of the presentation of the English locations. But it was George V who was monarch 100 years ago. So Victorian it wasn’t)

The game has some hidden object scenes, but not of the usual variety. All HO scenes are very much attuned to the game. In one instance the task is finding matching boots in a shoe store owned by a murder suspect, which leads to finding a victim’s shoe,
which will be used to track her movements on the night she was murdered. In another you must search a Chicago train platform and adjacent train cars for scraps of fabric that will be reassembled into a dress a murder victim intended to wear.

This is a very well thought out game. The opening 90-second or so tracking scene is, itself, worth the price of admission.

If the game had one failing, it was in the bonus game.(I really can’t describe it, even with spoiler tags, in a way that wouldn’t give away THE BIG SECRET.

And that’s the problem. Just like another game, Phantsamat, the basic game ended satisfactorily, with all loose ends seemingly tied up. But then the bonus game untied our square knot, added a few more strings and presented us with a
French braid solution. And there was a fair amount of contention between those that played the basic game and those that played the Collector’s Edition.

I, for one, asked whether the BIG SECRET really meant anything. Couldn’t everything have take place as we think it did, assuming we all think time travel is possible, and then the BIG SECRET occurred? I don’t think that was ever resolved to everyone’s
satisfaction.

A fun game that literally requires you to suspend belief in order to truly immerse yourself in the game. If you can do that, you will enjoy it.

Note: I apologize for the grainy quality of the image. The actual game resolution is much, much better.

Is that screenshot from the CE chapter? I have no memory of that location at all...

It’s the scene in the subway where she discovers the detective’s body. I never played the CE…except vicariously on YouTube.

I know. But even though there was plenty of discussion during the game, the real fireworks started after the bonus game concluded. It would have made sense to me if one of the major characters had died after the main game concluded, but before the bonus game started. Then, even though you would still have to suspend belief for the time travel, things would kind of make sense. It would also explain how physical objects could be transported between two eras.