Game: Entwined: The Perfect Murder
Genre: Adventure, Casual, Indie, Hidden Objects
System: Steam (Windows & macOS)
Developers | Publishers: Urchin Games | HH-Games
Controller Support: None
Price: US $5.99 | UK £4.79 | EU € 5,99
Release Date: September 2, 2014
Review code used, with many thanks to HH-Games.
Entwined: The Perfect Murder is a point-and-click adventure game about an old man who was murdered the morning he won the lottery. Was he killed because of the money, or was there a different motive?
The Story and Gameplay
You play a homicide detective who has been called in because of a murder. The old man, Mr. Turner, was shot in his garden while taking his tea. There are clues hidden all around the body and inside of the home. The family and the neighbors are all suspects with motives. How will the detectives find the murderer?
The gameplay is fairly typical of a point-and-click hidden object game. Depending on the level of difficulty a player has chosen, you need to look around the house and garden for clues that may or may not have visual cues. I played on the lowest difficulty, so I’m unsure of how difficult the puzzles and things are on the higher levels.
Each piece of the puzzle is locked behind hidden-object, movement, and other kinds of puzzles. Each room contains more mysteries, more clues, and gets the player just a little closer to solving the murder.
The Pros of Entwined: The Perfect Murder
The puzzles range from fairly easy to very difficult, and players who like to have a variety of different kinds of puzzles thrown at them will love this title. The hidden-object puzzle objects are well-blended into the backgrounds, making them more interesting and much more difficult.
Entwined: The Perfect Murder also has some very good visuals and unique puzzles too. I like the look of many of the rooms and the layouts. It was visually interesting and the sound design was also pretty good for an inexpensive title.
The Cons of Entwined: The Perfect Murder
Where to start with this game.
While the hidden-object puzzles were well-blended, they were incredibly repetitive. There was a hidden-object scene in the trunk of the car three or four times. Each of the hidden scenes was reused at least once, making the once interesting puzzles annoying. They were also extremely sensitive, making it hard to click on the object sometimes in certain situations.
The solutions to many of the puzzles didn’t make any sense at all. There was a portion of the game where players need to take a teapot full of boiling water to help unstick an item, but instead of filling the kettle in the sink directly, players had to unlock a cup first to fill then fill the kettle with the cup. There were tons of puzzles similar to this: players had to use the knife on the string and could not use the scissors, the wood carving implement couldn’t be used in place of an ice-chipping tool to chip some ice off a drawer.
Many of these puzzles were so unintuitive, I spent a lot of time hitting the hint button.
The story of this game is so simple, the characters so uninspired and flat that it is incredibly boring, even though some of the puzzles are fun. The main two detective characters are so bland that I felt no connection to them. And the animation on the people ranges from just okay to ridiculous and jarring. There is very little visually and emotionally to like about the characters in Entwined: The Perfect Murder.
It’s really a shame too because I have heard that the other game in the Entwined series is actually a really great game and it is nowhere near the rushed story of its sequel.
Conclusion
Sadly, the story of Entwined: The Perfect Murder feels rushed and the characters are bland. And although there are some unique puzzles, they are rehashed too often. This game is only worth picking up if you really, really love HOG games. Otherwise, there are better point-and-click adventure games out there.
Final Verdict: I Don’t Like it.
