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Casual Friday

The above game has a long title,  James Patterson Women’s Murder Club - A Darker Shade of Grey. It’s one in a series. I actually don’t know how many games there are in the series because BigFishGames didn’t distribute all of them. I know there are at least three.

The games are produced by Floodlight Games. I don’t know how much James Patterson was actually involved, although I’m sure he had some input. The game titles have no equivalent book title that I know of. The mastermind, of course, carries the credited title of Designer and Creative Director. That person, Jane Jensen of Sierra fame, carried the same title at Oberon Games which produced games very similar to this one. This was apparently her “bridge job” that supported her creative spark between GK3 and Gray Matter.

This game is fairly static. That is there is little or no animation. The story is basically told, and very well told, by cartoon-srip-style graphics. While I like the game’s style, it had some serious mechanical issues. The conversaions are all subtitled or displayed in dialog balloons. Unfortunately, at least in this game, you only have two choices…wait for the next piece of dialog to emerge, which seems to take an eternity, or skip the dialog entirely. Which, of course you can’t do because you might miss a clue.

There are no HO scenes as we would normally define them. Instead, there are mini-puzzles that require you to, for example, find five objects in the subject’s room that have some personal significance. Or, find ten objects in a room, and place them where they correctly belong. Again…mechanics! Some of the puzzles require precise placement. Often I used a hint, and find out I was absolutely correct, but just didn’t find the exact pixel to click on. Or, in the case of the above graphic, find ten missing envelopes.

If I were to categorize these games I would place them closer the the Agatha Christie games such as Death on the Nile, which were true HO-only games supported by a plot from an Agatha Christie novel.

I played three of these games. I really didn’t like them all that much. But they still come up as a topic of conversation on the Casual Games thread. Mostly because the stories are very engaging and also very well plotted.

I was able to track down four games: Darker Shade of Grey, Little Black Lies, Death in Scarlet and Twice in a Blue Moon. There may be more, but I could find no record of them.

The characters in the game are the same as those in the books. (Although, as I said in the above recap, I found no book titles that matched the game titles.) There was even a TV show focused on the four characters. Of the four cast members, only Angie Harman is familiar to me.

The four characters were a police detective, a newspaper reporter, a forensic pathologist and a lawyer. They all appeared, but only two, or maybe three ever played an active role in any given game.