Game Classification

An opera troupe is commissioned by Count Vlad Vansig III to perform at his small village. After arriving at the creepy, desolate place, the performers start to be slaughtered in mysterious circumstances. A frightened stagehand starts to investigate the killings, searching the village and surrounding locations for clues about the murders.

Nightfall Mysteries: Curse of the Opera is a hidden object game with adventure elements. The player explores the locations as in most point-and-click adventures, by clicking on the edges of the screen to move to the next place. The cursor is context-sensitive, changing into an arrow to indicate an exit hotspot, morphing into a hand when hovering over an inventory object, transforming into a magnifying glass when placed over a scene spot with a zoom view, displaying a speech balloon when over a character with dialog options, and changing into a jigsaw piece when near one of the mini-games.

A seek-and-find challenge has to be completed on certain locations, where the objective is to find and click on all the items listed at the bottom of the screen. Sometimes, the goal is to find several instances of the same object. The hint button is a theater mask at the bottom-right corner, showing the exact position of one of the required items, but taking 25 seconds to recharge after use. After collecting all the objects, the scene can be further explored for necessary inventory tools and items.

The inventory items have to be used by dragging and dropping them from the tray at the bottom to any logical place on the scenery, to perform an action or complete a task. Mini-games appear at certain points, where the player has to complete a circuit within a fuse box, connect wires to input combination numbers to a lock, move discs on a Tower of Hanoi variation, and complete other similar challenges. The mini-games can be optionally skipped after three minutes. [source:mobygames]

Distribution : Retail - Commercial
Platform(s) : Macintosh - PC (Windows)

Links

• http://www.mobygames.com/game/nightfall-mysteries-curse-of-the-op [...]