Secrets of the Dark: Mystery of the Ancestral Estate

This could have been a great long game but there is too much running around. You really have to keep a list of where you need certain things & this gets to be bothersome as the game progresses... Otherwise good combination of search & find + puzzles.

This was a clever, well crafted, graphically beautiful, challenging and fun game. Okay, the story line was silly in the usual way of these things, but nevertheless engaging. And there were some really novel touches; I especially liked the way certain rooms "morphed" between normal and creepy realities, with items to be discovered in each reality or an action in one reality affecting what was going on in the other. There were quite a lot of locations and the game was packed with interesting and challenging puzzles. Another feature I really enjoyed was the progression of day into night, and the cute little animations around some of the hidden object scenes. The team that created this game should be congratulated on the fantastic level of detail. This game took me HOURS to finish, and I'm usually no slouch at these things. I paid just AU$9.00 and in retrospect would happily have paid a lot more than that. I reckon that's great value, and this will definitely be on my list of games worth playing again.