The murder looks like a cover up. There has not been official statements and the mother (your sister) was not allowed to see her daughter’s body.

The game has five chapters, and you need to resolve one or multiple situations in each to get to the next one. Information are presented in nice looking cutscenes and during the chapters. It is important to pay close attention to those information as they can help you in each chapter.

The game’s style looks and feels like other Film Noire games such as Max Payne, even though you are not going to shoot a single bullet in the game.

The game offers three main scenarios. In the first, you need to find clues by taking photos of a scene. This happens in chapter one for instance; You visit the apartment of your niece to find out what happened. For this, you need to take photos and find all the clues in the apartment.

Then there are sequences where you talk to someone, and need to pick the right multiple-choice responses. If you fail, you need to start over. You get the first dialogs at the police station where you try to find information about the murder.

You need to combine items in the last mode. This resembles adventures of the old where you often had to find and combine items to create a new item that you needed.

The developers have put lots of work in the game. It features great looking images and cutscenes, and the story keeps you wondering and guessing what happened right until the end. Each chapter is short enough so that you wont feel exhaustion or boredom. Good players will finish the game in less than half an hour.

You can play Bela Kovacs and The Trail of Blood at Kongregate.

Unlike those aforementioned adventures Poizoned Mind uses multiple choice to interact with the environment. You step out of the train, poisoned, greeted by Death himself asking if you are ready to come along. And so the adventure unfolds. You don’t want to die, just yet, don’t you ?

Talk to Death and other characters about Life, Death, Transition and other aspects of life. Some dialogs add new topics to the multiple choice options which will lead you deeper into this adventure. You have to be very careful though what you do because one wrong step and Death takes you with him.

Poizoned Mind has a subtle humor which works perfectly with the setting of the game. And, you meet the King. If that is not enough to try it out maybe the size of only 2 Megabytes and the fact that it does not need to be installed does the rest.

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Poizoned Mind (scroll down)
via Gnome’s Lair

Fate by Numbers is a Sci-Fi noir FMV adventure game which is exactly the same technique that Sierra used in their cinematic adventures. You play the role of Alice Sanger, a private detective, who recently got an assignment from an anonymous client to retrieve a briefcase.

A sniper shoots her during the retrieval mission and she now decides to find out more about the motive and background of the assignment.

Several movie clips narrate the story up to this point. It looks extremely well done for a non commercial project. Voice and movie playback however seem to be a bit out of sync. This could be a problem of my computer though.

The game interface looks like the one on the screenshot above. When you click on an item on the screen the menu pops up giving you options to manipulate the object. It takes some time to get used to this interface though.

Fate by Numbers runs on Windows XP and Vista and has a huge size of 1.2 Gigabytes. Downloads are only available using bittorrent.

Take a look at the trailer for more information.

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Fate by Numbers Homepage

Some fans decided to create their own versions of Lucasarts games and Maniac Mansion is surely one of the games with the most fan based add-ons and remakes ever. First there is Maniac Mansion Deluxe, a faithful copy to the original Maniac Mansion game with improved graphics and a interface that reminds me of Day of the Tentacle, the successor of Maniac Mansion. The goal in Maniac Mansion is to create a team of three students – out of seven available ones – and rescue Sandy who was kidnapped by the evil Dr.Fred.

Each student has certain advantages but also disadvantages which may aid or hinder you in some puzzles throughout the game. You interact by using the words in the lower half of the screen with items that are visible on the screen. A simple example would be to click on open and the on the door to open the door.

The most used command for a item will always be available on right-click. For the door it would be open, or close if it is open. You can switch characters by clicking on their icons or pressing F1-F3. F5 loads or saves a game, F8 restarts the game, ESC stops sequences and ALT-X closes the game.

Just a great remake would not be enough of course for a Maniac Mansion overkill. The website Maniac Mansion Mania has a list of fan made Maniac Mansion games that all use the look and feel of the original.

The games are categorized in seasons and episodes. Season one for instance contains ten episodes. All can be played without additional files. Most games are unfortunately available in German only but some have been translated to English and other languages as well.

It seems that some fans are currently translating all episodes into English to make those games available to a worldwide audience. Four of the ten episodes of season one have been translated into English by now. Take a look at all seasons and episodes of Maniac Mansion or the international ones only.

The website offers a creators pack as well, you may download it and create your own episodes using the interface and characters known from Maniac Mansion.

Update: Sancho’s Island is no longer available at the original website. The website itself has been closed down and is now returning advertisement and nothing more. Since it was only hosted on that site and no other sites, it is fair to assume that the game can no longer be played online.

If you like adventures take a look at this beauty, head over to sanchoisland to give it a try.

At least three, if not four, parts of Sancho’s Island have been posted by the developers on the site before it was closed down. It is not clear why the site has been removed.

I suggest you check out the adventure game section over at Newsgrounds which lists hundreds of games for you to play. The majority of games posted on the site does not reach the quality of Sancho’s Island though.

One adventure that is comparable in many regards is Bela Kovacs and The Trail of Blood which you can play over at Kongregate. The game has a classic Film Noir touch to it, with excellent graphics and sound. One thing that you may notice though is that it is not overly difficulty to complete. Most of the time you have to find objects on the screen that you need to progress. Multiple choice answers are offered in conversations that determine whether you can continue adventuring or need to restart the conversation.