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Within every hard-boiled detective beats a warm and sentimental heart, which is why Anton Muller is following up on strange note he found in Little Noir Stories: The Case of the Missing Girl. A single photograph with a shadowy figure in a window isn't much to go on, but what Anton lacks in leads he makes up for in determination, instinct, and sheer bullheadedness.The hunt for clues makes mysteries a natural setting for hidden object games. In The Case of the Missing Girl, areas you need to search are highlighted with a sparkly swirl and clicking on them zooms in on that part of the room. The searches vary between the usual styles: sometimes you're given a shopping list of items to find, other times you need to find a set number of a particular item, occasionally you're simply given a goal, such as finding photo developing equipment, and left to figure out what that is. It's not unusual for searches to stretch across several different rooms, which means you'll be doing a lot of backtracking and revisiting the same rooms over and over and over again. This could have killed any enjoyment to be had, but The Case of the Missing Girl does something very, very smart: When you've cleared a room of everything that will currently help you, an arrow tells you "You're done here!" Simple, but effectively short-circuiting any frustration before it can even begin. The expected Whitman's sampler of puzzles is mixed in with the hidden object finding, but they're well done and vary nicely in difficulty. Some you'll undoubtedly solve in mere moments, while others will have your brow firmly furrowed. They're all skippable, though, if you'd rather just get on with the story. Read more...
