Games.com Diary: Mortimer Beckett and the Time Paradox
I took a new game for a spin this morning -- Mortimer Beckett and the Time Paradox, which currently sits at #11 of the most downloaded games on Games.com!
Mortimer Beckett and the Time Paradox is another hidden object game -- the main goal is to scour each image and find items or pieces of items in order to progress through the level. We put together a general how-to play hidden object games guide a few weeks ago, but since each one varies, I thought it would be interesting to walk through the first few levels of this one.
MBTP is one of those hidden object games in which you have to find pieces of each object instead of a whole object, which makes it considerably more difficult (you can't simply search for a Book object, for example - instead you have to find parts of it). The most useful tactic in these games is to find corners that stick out from behind other objects or look in patterned areas that tend to camouflage pieces well.
Time Paradox follows the story of a strapping young man by the name of Mortimer Beckett (he starred in Mortimer Beckett and the Secrets of Spooky Manor too), who finds himself stumbling through time portals in an attempt to collect pieces of the Time Bomb and reverse the paradox. Plot is usually the last thing on my mind when I'm playing a hidden-object game, but in this case, it explained the wacky shifts from Viking ships to Victorian mansions.
I started off the first screens (Do you call them screens? Levels? Images? Slides?) the same way I usually do in these games -- by randomly clicking around for a few seconds in the hopes of uncovering a few pieces by sheer luck. Then I noticed that certain items were highlighted with text -- a "Wall" here, a "Nest" there, even an arrow with "Go to the Ship." I quickly realized that, much like other piecemeal hidden object games, items that I completed would later be 'used' on other objects in the screen.
I also came across minigame fairly early on in the game -- as you can see from the images above, the puzzle seemed to require matching each of the rings on the shield (the result, on the right, was a griffin). After I did so, one of the Rock pieces I'd been missing was revealed.
Completing this section of Time Paradox involves going back and forth between the 'areas' (each area is a screen) and using items from one in another. Eventually (spoiler alert!) you'll end up gaining access to a cave, where the first time portal will appear.
The demo we have on Games.com lets you play through one more section of the game, the Victorian era -- I'll leave you to find out for yourself how it and the rest of the game progresses!
Go play Mortimer Beckett and the Time Paradox! And then come back and let us know what you think of the game. Was it too hard? Too easy? Did you care for the storyline and art at all?
