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Casual Friday

This game, 3 Cards to Midnight, received a lot of critical notice when it first came out. The sides seemed equally split between those that hated it and those that loved it. If there was a middle ground, it was hard to find. Me? I thought the story was interesting, but disliked just about everything else.

The game starts with you waking up in a room being questioned/interrogated/
psychoanalyzed by a person you don’t know. The process is intended to restore your memory. Things you will discover include the fact that the parents you have known all your life are not your real parents, and that your real father has been locked in a mental institution for the last thirty years.

The interrogation technique involves tarot cards. There are three cards-per-chapter. (Thus the game’s title.) Each card is used as a key to a place or person that you will revisit to uncover bits of your memory. Each location revolves around word association. For example, one of your keywords might be “Book”. You see a note lying on a table. When you click on it, the association “notebook” is created. It is a clever way to do Hidden Object scenes. But that is really all they are. And the repetitiveness of them really gets tiring after a few chapters.

The graphics are nice, but they are confined to a small square in the middle of your monitor, surrounded by a large black border. This makes it quite difficult to see many of the hidden objects. And since you are only allowed three hints-per-chapter, it makes for tedious gameplay. In fact, if you grab a screenshot on your PC using Alt|PrtScn, you will find that the small square is actually a windowed version of the game.

There is game “Menu”. But it doesn’t include the standard “Options” section. So you can’t adjust screen size. Nor can you adjust the various sound levels, which are annoyingly loud and often distorted.

Bottom line is that this game could have been so much better. But, to me, it wasn’t.

Side note: In another thread, which has scrolled to page four, people were asking about what was going on with Big Finish Games. I was severely chastised by some thread contributors for pointing out that Big Finish Games bore a stricking resemblence to Big Fish Games. How dare I compare a tawdry puveryor of casual crap with the people who gave us Tesla Effect and the soon-to-be-released, maybe, update to Overseer?

Funny. It turns out that Big Finish Games is also the development group that turned out this little bit of excrement. (Available for $6.99US from Big Fish Games.)

Final note: This is the 52nd edition of Casual Friday. I’ve had some help from chrissie and Becky along the way. I think they’ve contributed five or six when I was unable to meet my deadline. Thank you. It’s been fun, kinda! I’ll be back next month, but will be sharing duties with Oscar on an every-other-week basis from that point forward.

I hope you enjoyed what we did this year.

Thanks for the run so far, and for the many good CCPT suggestions in it.

As Furgotten says the 2 Rita James games were ok in a fun, don’t take it seriously, way.

The story for 3 Cards to Midnight was fine but the criticisms above are valid. Another problem was non Americans/reasonably fluent English speakers had trouble in recognising what objects actually were and, as Tim says originally, the small letterbox format of the screen definitely didn’t help.
However, if you persevere for the sake of the story (worthwhile in my view) then try 3 Cards to Deadtime. Some of the problems were definitely sorted, screen size amongst them, and the story proceeds to involve the gamer. The only downside is the third in the trilogy never got made (and Aaron Connors is on record saying that he’ll never do another casual game again) so the eventual denouement will never be known

chrissie - 27 May 2016 07:17 AM

I’ve looked at everyone + your descriptions & it’s great that you’re going to continue! 

Thanks to you for following the thread. In addition to helping me out when personal matters made my weekly contribution difficult.

Maybe this is not the forum to discuss this. But I thought I would share. As it’s the end of the year.

I REALLY wanted to do this. That is, I really wanted to make people aware that there are some good things happening in the genre of casual games. At the same time, I didn’t think it would be fair to offer gorgeous screen-shots without offering some context. Was it a good game was one of my first concerns.

And so I tried to balance the description of the screen-shot with a review of the game. And finally with my thoughts as to whether the game was worth playing. So it probably ended up being a bit more complex than….

Here’s the shot. And here’s the name of the game.

Still not sure about my approach, but it is what it is. Or rather was what it was.

I enjoyed your reviews, Tim.  It was interesting to revisit those I’ve played and to learn about new ones.

Becky - 29 May 2016 11:08 AM

Just curious—why did you choose to write about older casual games, rather than the latest ones?

That is one of the easiest questions I’ve ever had to answer.

Truth is, between Casual Friday, the Casual Games thread, the CCPT thread, (which will re-appear in three days,) guitar lessons, general household chores and life, I haven’t had too much time to play many new games. Those that I do play I generally review on Casual Games. And since you and others are aware of my feelings regarding sequels, particularly after they’ve reached the third game, I’m not really finding much these days that is new and original.