Spirits of Mystery: Family Lies Collector's Edition

As it should be fairly obvious, rich families are much more exposed to some sorts of dangers, such as kidnappings for ransom. However, fantasy stories make it even harder for wealthy folks to live a happy life, because all sorts of trouble follow them around. In fact, the worst thing you could be in a fantasy tale is some kind of royalty.

Spirits of Mystery: Family Lies is a hidden object adventure game in which you play the role of a young princess trying to defeat an evil sorcerer and rescue her parents at the same time. The game is not unique in any way when it comes to gameplay mechanics or anything else in this regard, but the least it could have offered the players was a more original story.

Instead, you are forced to listen to yet another tale of woe about a beautiful princess that gets targeted by an evil sorcerer, and she is the only one that can help her parents. You start by having no idea what the evil man in question wants, but you soon unravel a bunch of secrets that shed a bit of light on the situation. Some other characters get involved along the way as well.

As mentioned before, you shouldn’t expect anything revolutionary when it comes to the gameplay. Most of the puzzles are just variations on the same theme, namely to find the pattern or arrange some items in the correct order. There are hidden object scenes that challenge you to find a number of items in a pile of junk, although the mechanics oscillate a bit from scene to scene.

Thankfully, at least the visual quality is more than decent, especially when it comes to level design and the detailed scenes that have been created for the story. Granted, the cutscenes are a bit too simple to impress anyone, but the rest should be enough to get you in the proper mood for a mystery. There’s even voice acting to help with immersion, not to mention the soundtrack that keeps the atmosphere steady.

The sad thing is that Spirits of Mystery: Family Lies is just more of the same, especially if you are familiar with everything else in the genre. On the other hand, if you don’t mind doing the same puzzles and hearing to the same cliches all over again, then this shouldn’t be a problem.

NOTE: This is a downloader for the game. Once run, the application will automatically download and install the game on your computer.

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