Alicia Griffith – Lakeside Murder

Alicia Griffith – Lakeside Murder. First of all lemme take a breather. This one was tedious and mind numbing. I completely understood why the girl protagonist sounded so unenthusiastic. Thing that I went through is a curse of any HOG. But I can’t even call this game a full-fledged HOG because this game is missing the hidden objects part. I started to get suspicious a quarter game in and I was pretty flabbergasted with the fact. How the feck do you miss the one of cornerstones of a HOG? Not to mention that around 2 hours in (I usually beat a HOG game in one sitting, that’s my rule) my mind started to get numb. Item after item I kept asking myself “the feck do I need this for” and “I used that item on that thing why didn’t it register the interaction”.  Oh thank heavens it’s over.

Plot. Murder happened in some bum- I mean remote town by the name of Turmville somewhere in USA / Name comes from a very rare flower discovered by a local botanist many years ago. One protagonist, Alicia Griffith (not even gonna do the Berserk joke), here to solve the mystery. Body of a poor girl named Melissa was found in a cabin with a stab wound on her chest and cuts on her wrists. Some investigation time later we find out the murder was an ancient Mayan ritual. Long time ago very similar murder happened in this very town. Do I spoil the rest? It’s not really worth it but I’m think I’m not going to. Hate to be the only one to suffer through this game. Gameplay wise it’s the cookie cutter HOG minus hidden objects part. I mean the scenery looks good, but characters look and move uncanny which is quite common for a HOG but still.

Right, since there is nothing new about the gameplay I'd rather talk a little bit about the puzzles of this game. Out of all of them I skipped three and out of those three only one I skipped due to my laziness. The other two were, first is a variation of a barley-break where you have three horizontal knobs that rotate pieces clockwise and counterclockwise to make a picture. Second was to match pin shapes in a lock. For those two my patience said “Aw hell naw”. Luckily there was no penalty for the achievements… if you care about them. You need to finish 20 puzzles to get all the puzzle related achievements. Anyway, you easily can skip this one and you're not going to lose anything worth playing.