[Review] 9 Clues: The Secret of Serpent Creek

Halloween is here! And there's nothing more typical than going Trick or Treating, watch horror movies, or play horror games. 9 Clues: The Secret of Serpent Creek is not a horror game per se, but it's still a very fitting game for this time of the year. Do you want to know why? then continue reading, that's it if you dare.

9 Clues: The Secret of Serpent Creek is a Hidden Object game which tells the story of a private eye who came to Serpent Creek after receiving a call from Helen Hunter, a famous reporter and her friend. Once we arrive we are attacked by a shadowy figure and soon after that we realize there's something dark going on in the town.

The game does a great job at creating a grim atmosphere. The background, the characters and the different objects we have to pick thorough the game are very well done, and along a fitting soundtrack, voice acting and sound effects it manages to give a creepy vibe from the beginning to the end of the game.

Sadly the plot is really predictable to the point you can tell who the main villain is right away. It's still engaging, but it could have been better.

Welcome to Serpent Creek!

The game mechanics are fairly polished and offers a good variety of puzzles. They are the usual "find all the listed objects", some jigsaws, others were we have to activate all the blocks in a circle to unlock a door, and so on. It also adds a detective mode which will make the player look for clues and then make deductions based on what was found. I personally recommend playing it on hard if you want it to be a bit challenging since most of the puzzles are fairly easy. It also helps to not get tempted to spam the hint button.

A skull, a prosthetic hand, some chloroform, a frozen brain...
You know, the typical stuff you'll find in a wrecked car

Would I recommend this game? Yes. Even if it's not groundbreaking it's quite decent. It'll keep you entertained for around 4 hours.

Extra information:

Developer: Tap It Games

Publisher: Artifex Mundi
Language: English, French, German, Spanish, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Polish, and Brazilian Portuguese

Avaliable platforms: PC (Steam), Android and iOS

System Requirements:

- Windows XP/Vista/7/8 - OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.8 or better (Mac) - Ubuntu 12 or better (Linux)

- CPU: 1.5 GHz processor

- Memory: 512 MB RAM

- Graphics: 128 MB

- Hard Disk: 1 GB of available hard disk space