Up until the 1920’s, more Americans were living in rural areas than in cities – however near the end of the Jazz Age, between the Great War and World War II, all that changed. People flocked to cities and urbanization hit the United States like a steam-powered locomotive clobbering a cabbage truck.
In Valerie Porter and the Scarlet Scandal, developed by GameBrains, you play the titular Valerie Porter, a slightly naïve but intelligent young woman searching for her big break in late 1920’s New York City. Though kleptomania won’t be a diagnosed illness for decades, your penchant for stealing bells has resulted in your relocation to the city, in hopes of becoming a star reporter for the Daily Informer. Your big break surfaces when you’re hired to replace Sharon T——-, former reporter at the Informer. The paper’s top reporter, Terry Morgan, takes you under her wing and offers some protection from your sexist editor-in-chief. However all is not as it seems, and your first exposé about the corrupt mayor seems to have resulted in the murder of an ex-cabaret dancer turned movie star named Scarlet Velour! Use the powers of journalism to get to the bottom of this tragedy.
Valerie Porter and the Scarlet Scandal is a hidden object adventure game, and quite an active one at that. Like most hidden object games, gameplay primarily involves searching a scene strewn with all manner of knickknacks and junk. You have a list of specific objects to find; clicking on one of these items removes it from the scene and your list. After finding all the objects, you move to the next scene. And so on. Hidden object games are the most popular casual games.
When you’re stumped and can’t find an object, a hint is available in the form of a lightbulb. When charged, click on it for an inspiring clue to the location of one object on your list. Your eureka bulb recharges over time, but every scene contains two batteries that you can collect to recharge it instantly if needed.
Like many hidden object games, Valerie Porter and the Scarlet Scandal often asks you to find multiples of the same kind of item. For example: seven trophies, five timepieces, ten hotdogs, etc. In a new mechanic, the game allows you to chain together these objects to collect more than one at a time, by holding down the mouse button and “connecting the dots” from one item to the next. This chain lightning effect charges your lightbulb. The longer the chain, the more powerful the charge.
The game is untimed, however once per chapter you must ride the subway to or from a location. This ride lasts a maximum of one minute, and offers a chance to recharge your lightbulb – if you can find a certain number of grouped objects in sixty seconds or less.
Every scene also contains five bells. Can Valerie pocket all one hundred bells across the twelve chapters that make up the game? Finding them awards you medals, so if you like in-game achievements, keep your eyes peeled.
Though technically Valerie Porter is a hidden object adventure game, it’s a limited one with an inventory/puzzle system confined to individual scenes. Among your list of items to find you’ll see tasks or items written in red script. These require some sort of interaction between an item in your inventory and a portion of the scene. Using a key to unlock a filing cabinet in order to deposit a file, for example.
At the end of each chapter your story hits the presses, the edition hits the streets, and the game gives you a numerical score based on the time it took you to complete the chapter, the longest chain of similar objects found, the batteries you didn’t use, and the minigames you didn’t skip.
The Valerie Porter and the Scarlet Scandal game was most impressive with these rather clever minigames. As a journalist, you get to interview witnesses, write stories, and even compose headlines. All are portrayed in minigames. I liked that some sort of memory of objects found when snooping around various locations was required later to organize your thoughts (in the form of a word search puzzle). Perhaps the most fun minigame involved writing an article, madlib style. (Check out the screenshot to the left for an amusing example of one of my stories in progress.) None of the minigames felt superfluous or tacked on just to pad the game. I have to commend GameBrains for impressing a sense of fourth estate activity, albeit simplified, upon the player.
Equally impressive are the character voice overs; almost every line is spoken, which helps animate the slightly predictable plot. You know how there’s always that one voice actor whose lines makes you roll your eyes so hard that your eyeballs make a small sound and your cat (or dog) turns its head and looks at you? Well, thankfully they didn’t hire that actor for this game.
However, I can’t give out all gold stars… the game is displayed in the inexcusably low resolution of 800×600 pixels! Though there are few tiny objects to get muddled at that resolution, now and then I had to waste a hint on an object (some rosary beads resting on a plate of food) that I probably would have been able to spot at 1024×768 or higher. Probably. Maybe. It’s 2009, friends! We’ve all got newer computers that blur images when they’re upsampled to our monitors’ native screen depths!
Review by Uesugi
