Evil Masterminds 4-in-1 Bundle:
FBI: Paranormal Case
Frankenstein: The Dismembered Bride
Jack the Ripper: Letters from Hell
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: The Strange Case

Two things about this bundle: firstly, all games are the Extended Editions, as stated in the bundler's dialog pictured below. This dialog uses the shorter titles, presumably to fit in the "extended edition" bit. The Oberon/CasualGames site didn't say which titles were included at all, although it does sell the individual games, and, an example of sloppy bundling, the bundler's icon file has no icon graphic. Secondly, these games are again by HdO and have the same interface, gameplay and scrollable opening and ending screens - although they tend to start with three rather than the full six clues, and apparently I can create only three profiles - as the Classic Adventures 4-in-1 Bundle on the previous page.

FBI: Paranormal Case doesn't quite fit in thematically, because there is no evil mastermind, just a respectable alien trying to shake off a Fox Mulder clone. As music reminding of the X-Files and Doctor Who plays in the background, FBI agent William James, having inherited the office of another agent who went missing in Siberia, wastes no time in decorating it to his taste, with posters of Nessie and UFOs. He cleans up the office, as represented by a search screen (where "empty trashcan" is not an object, but an action!), then sorts out his mail in a screen where I have to guess the meaning of the folder from its icon; most are straightforward, but that the "backup folder" has a picture of a floppy drive makes me wonder in which era this game was made - or maybe they're going for retro appeal. Once comfortably settled in, he is given a succession of "X-file" cases (find scientists that went missing in Antarctica due to a cold-resistant killer bacteria, locate a monster in a processing plant in France, find evidence of Sasquatch, visit the Bermuda Triangle) which he not quite solves, always spotting a triangle symbol (looks like a constellation, and whaddyaknow...) at the site. At the end, he is convinced that aliens are involved and revisits every scene from his investigations to find proof.

The graphics are as varied as the locations, with a very pretty DNA sequencing minigame, a drawer full of autumn leaves and toadstools in the ranger's home and a map that's interesting because it shows the geographical distribution of Native American tribes (no idea how accurate it is, though). The English is hokey but overall okay, although a "leghold trap" is a bear trap, torches and flashlights are confused in the scene where the player has to "light all the flashlights" and "chamois" usually refers to the leather made from the animal, not the animal itself. The plurals are not so jarring as in the previous collection of HdO games, or maybe they just went for the easy ones. Narratively, though, the story doesn't really make sense, and the final meeting with the alien is hilarious: "I am a Colon, as one might say in your language." Welcome to this planet, Great Intestine. Please accept this dictionary as a gift.

Under the cloudy red glow of sunset, with hooo-hooo ghostly music playing, Brad Lupin is searching for his wife, who went missing while he was on a journalist trip in Europe; which makes me wonder where he's supposed to be living, or where it is that he's searching now, because it looks like he's in Transylvania. Especially since his wife is called Janet.

His surname, on the other hand, reminds me of Lupin the master thief, the main character with several anime films. Maybe that's why Brad, while having a realistic face, has anime character expressions: the blue lines of terror on his forehead, the hearts or bolts of lightning to show his mood and, of course, the giant sweat drop. But that's just conjecture, the horror classic referenced in Frankenstein: The Dismembered Bride is that of Frankenstein who created an artificial human from bits of corpse, and to a lesser extent The Bride of Frankenstein, the film about the making of artificial human #2. The first will be referred to in passing, the second points at the fate of poor Janet.

The first search screen, the front door of a deserted manor, is so aesthetically pleasing that Janet's plight doesn't seem very urgent to me, and I'll just say it right now: this game is worth playing for the outside scenes, and possibly for the horror-comedy indoors ones (like a tub filled with blood and rubber duckies) but certainly not for the protagonists. Having gained access to the house and hearing a female scream, Brad shows his intellect at work: "A woman's scream could only come from the kitchen. It's obvious!" Sadly for him, the scream came from the cellar-slash-dungeon, where he slips on an icky old brain with tentacles, which is all that remains of Janet. Joining forces with this PMS-ing brain, that sometimes screams for no reason after I finish a puzzle, to collect the other pieces of her and put her back together, he calls her the "brain" of the team (hurrr funny) and they generally make insensitive remarks at each other while stupidly anime-emoting. It gets icky where her leg has to be exhumed, and her head fished out of a stew; I'm not sure respectively rotten and boiled flesh can be stuck together to make a living body.

Brad is an idiot, whose English is stilted and whose love of Janet is only equalled by his love of Coke; the English in this game is generally bad, the ugly plurals having returned - "fl-y(ies)" - and the search screen object descriptions containing gems like "canvases" for cobwebs, "map of the world" for globe, "tub" for jerrycan, then later for barrel, "bell" for cloche, "adjustable wrench" for monkey wrench, "hand truck" for dolly and "baby carriage" for pram, although that expression is at least used in English; then "compass" for compasses again and, with a typo as topping on the cake, "set sqaure" for what's probably a protractor. The rooms are cluttered, and items are hard to find without the magnifying glass. It seems that, rather than being herded around by the game, I can walk from room to room at will to search, place or piece together objects, although once I'm completely done in a room, the arrow leading to it will no longer appear.

Like the other games in this collection and probably all HdO games, the game plays the same every time, only the search screen lists are ordered differently.

The glowering unshaven-looking head in the bundler pic of Jack the Ripper: Letters from Hell is not, in fact, the titular character. He is an honest bobby who suspects the main character of being less than honest, and keeps chucking him in jail for not remembering some detail of a previous search screen (if that detail was in said search screen at all!) and why? Because the main character, John Bert, a journalist with a Leninbeard working for the well-known newspaper The Star and looking for a juicy story to boost declining sales, keeps visiting locations connected with Jack the Ripper. Obviously an ultra-British fop prone to indignation, Mr Bert pulls up his nose at the squalor he encounters on these visits, is annoyed at the mere thought of answering the questions of the "stupid police", and does not think it at all excessive to take revenge for the jailings by posting fake letters supposedly from the killer. Until the killer decides to carry on where Bert began, and our intrepid journalist sees himself forced to call on the "stupid police" (who was onto him all this time) for help. He is told to move into the country and lie low for a while, and... there it ends. "Extended Edition" does not do this short little game justice.

The music is somewhat ominous, the grimy London scenes in browns and greys really require the help of the magnifying glass, and the story is somewhat mystifying; the first crime scene in Whitechapel, and the following minigames, are all about sheep! In contrast to the drab and murky tones of outdoor scenes, there is a recurring minigame where I have to click away envelopes in various neon colours. The whack-a-mole games, which usually have a click-for-points graphic and "don't click or you will be penalized" graphics, in this case only have the former, and the penalty is for not clicking them before they disappear. The English is fairly good and the game even presupposes too much knowledge on my part: how, in this age of digital photography, am I supposed to know the correct order of actions to develop photographs chemically? I have only one niggle: "black light" doesn't refer to special forensics equipment, but just means "click on the bulb to dim it".

I accidentally started a game in timed mode, and so was surprised by the star (visible in the middle screenshot) that kept popping up even though the available hints were already at the maximum of six. Apart from any photography-related screens, the timed scenes were easy to finish before the timer ran out.

The previous game was set in London, 1888; this game is set in 1885. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: The Strange Case is the only slightly altered version of the title of a short story by Robert Louis Stevenson, (The) Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which I must have read as a child (I recall the exaggerated description of how very Eeeevil Hyde looked) but of which I chiefly remembered that it was boring, being written in the stuffy prose typical of that period, and not in the least horrifying since I knew that Mr Hyde is Dr Jekyll, duh. (That's the problem with classics: everyone already knows the ending.) But since it was too long ago to remember any details, I don't know how much the story itself was altered in this game, and which of the two possible endings is the correct one. I certainly don't remember a David Utterson being rescued from an opium den and nursed back to health by Dr Jekyll, becoming a successful lawyer, chancing on his benefactor's will, seeing that everything has been left to a Mr Hyde and checking out this shady character. I do remember the growing despair (although this stays offscreen) of Dr Jekyll who finds himself taken over by his alter ego, who he can no longer suppress with the medicine he has at hand.

As said, the setting is nineteenth-century London, but so much less grimy and more warmly rendered. The opening screen showing smoke rising off the rooftops of houses that seemed lit from below already made me go "ooh! pretty!" and the two faces of Dr Jekyll in Normal and Evil mode are nicely done. The dark and/or sombre outdoors scenes contrast with some very cosy interiors. The music is mostly sad, sedate piano, sometimes veering off into dissonants and keening strings, and there are coughs in the jail cell and breathy voices in the final scenes. In all, the game captures the feeling of horror better than the original story. The gameplay is a bit unusual in that the first search screen only has a line "open your eyes 3x" which means: just click anywhere, three times, and is only there to create some atmosphere, while two later search screens have no object descriptions, but only a riddle, and there's a nice lineup of faces when trying to narrow down the suspects to Mr Hyde (clearly distinguished from the rest by how Eeeevil he looks). Another original search screen is the anatomical poster where (guess who paid attention during biology class) I got all the features right except the "adductor". This game's English is better than that of the other HdO games I've seen so far, with no glaring boo-boos, but there are still two niggles: firstly, in the cellar, there are two items that are both called "brush", but although the word appears twice in the object list, either instance is connected with one specific brush, so it would have been better to differentiate by calling one of them "paintbrush". Secondly, the names sometimes get mixed up, which results in Jekyll's servant Poole telling Utterson, who inquires after his master, to wait in the lounge while he goes to see Mr Utterson.

The World's Legends: Kashchey The Immortal

Under construction.

The first two Samantha Swift games:
Samantha Swift and the Hidden Roses of Athena
Samantha Swift and the Mystery from Atlantis

(To see how the saga continues, see the Hidden Object Heroes Bundle and the Heroic Adventures 4-in-1 Pack.)

Midnight Mysteries part 3 and 4:
Midnight Mysteries 3: Devil on the Mississippi
Midnight Mysteries - Haunted Houdini

(For what went before, see the Hidden Object Heroes Bundle and the Heroic Adventures 4-in-1 Pack.)

As well as being bundled with other games, the Midnight Mysteries have been combined with each other in various ways: parts 1 and 2, parts 2 and 3, and parts 1 through 4, so "Midnight Mysteries Bundle" can mean various things. I found it easier to buy parts 3 and 4 separately.

Under construction.