Last weekend was my sons 21st birthday. We have planned several outings (meals and other activities) to celebrate his birthday over the weeks following his official birthday (4th Jan), so I'll be away from home for most of the weekend apart from the evenings. Moderation will be late each day and I may not have enough time to post a review for Sundays game. I will moderate when I arrive home this evening.

Mountain Crime: Requital was originally given away on August 27th 2017 HERE, where it received a positive 91% from 34 votes and received 27 comments.

The download zip file is quite large at 866MB, so it may take some time to download, especially during the first several hours of the giveaway, when multiple downloads from the community may cause a bottleneck as there is limited bandwidth. The more community members downloading at any one time, the slower the download will become; with this in mind we ask that you refrain from using download managers that download up to 20 pieces of the file separately as this will only add to the overall load on the servers and is unfair to those who are not using a download manager. To get a feel for today's game before you download it, please check out several game-play videos of Mountain Crime: Recital HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE and HERE, plus a slideshow of around 50 images of today's game HERE.

Mountain Crime: Requital

In Brief

A Hidden Object game.

Introduction:

Set yourself in the shoes of a real detective in Mountain Crime: Requital! Both adults and children will enjoy this hidden object game with solid game play and well constructed puzzles. One rainy night somebody phoned you and asked to come and help a man who had a heart attack. You leave for the "White Wolf Hotel" to tend to an acutely ill patient. On your way a stranger points your car to a collapsing bridge and after nearly dying you come to the place to find it totally abandoned. Someone commits here one crime after another and you are to find the offender. Hurry up, or you will be the next victim! Learn how to play and start your inquiry. Find useful things, write down necessary information and solve various puzzles. Use hints when you are stuck. You may also peep into your journal to learn which place to visit. The game Mountain Crime: Requital has two difficulty modes. In the regular mode the "Hint" button recharges quickly and interactive zones are highlighted, while in the expert mode the "Hint" button recharges slowly and interactive zones are not highlighted. The graphics in the game Mountain Crime: Requital are really amazing. The hand-drawn backgrounds and environments are filled with an excruciating amount of details: rain cascades trickle down windows, candles and lights play gently with the curves of curtains and furniture. Are you ready for a thrilling adventure? Welcome to the game Mountain Crime: Requital!

Reference accessed HERE. 26th Aug 2017

The Game:

Review 1:

A doctor called to a newly opened mountain lodge to help a patient is drawn into a madman’s deadly game of revenge. Rainy nights, car crashes, washed out roads, abandoned hotels, crazed arch-villains out for revenge…these motifs have become the mainstays of hidden object games but unfortunately, rampant overuse has seriously diluted their impact. Alawar Stargazes hidden object adventure, Mountain Crime: Requital clearly illustrates this by misusing the studio’s considerable talents to present every thematic cliché in the book.

The game starts without preamble, as Dr. Phillip White (you) are called by a “Mr. Grey” (they were really stretching with the names here, eh?) to the White Wolf Hotel to tend to an acutely ill patient. After nearly dying (thanks to a hooded figure who points your car toward a collapsing bridge) you get to the hotel to find it totally abandoned. Well, not totally—there’s a guy dying of snake bite, a sketchy reporter type and a seemingly unhinged officer of the law who may or may not be up to something. It’s a bizarre set-up for what ends up being a bizarre—and not entirely cohesive—whodunit.

Mountain Crime: Requital (there’s the name issue again – the game’s title doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, does it?) starts with the cliché of the crashed car and abandoned hotel and then goes on to dutifully trot out every other known hidden object banality. Locked doors? Check. Unnecessarily weird machinery missing parts? Check. Blacksmith shop where you cast an item? Check. Grates to unscrew, fountains to fill, fuses to replace? Check, check and check. While it’s true that the very nature of adventure-style exploration demands the inclusion of these things, Mountain Crime: Requital does it in a tired, cynical sort of way. It’s like you can tell the development team was merely phoning this one in.

Harsh as that is, it doesn’t imply that the game is bad. In fact, the rich, colourful graphics were obviously made by a highly competent art team and although the human characters are the stuff of nightmares (especially the sheriff – yikes!) and the scale of the characters often seems out of whack with the architecture, the overall look of the game is really good in a moody sort of way. In general, the puzzles are extremely easy and solving them won’t take experienced adventurers any time at all but the pacing of the game is good throughout. Good too is the game’s method of communicating where you are and what your current objective is. Even without your journal as reference, you always know what to do since the hero frequently says things like, “I should go out back and look for the elevator parts.”

Thanks to this kind of solid design, the game offers a fairly satisfactory hidden object experience when it isn’t totally muddled by the convoluted story line. No spoilers here, but let’s just say that the secret you’re working to uncover has to do with a wealthy businessman, a wild heiress, a shady business deal, insurance fraud, arson, a child’s sanatorium, the 1980’s, a forgotten past and a completely un-looked-for family connection. It’s far too much to squeeze into one game and even though the developers go to great lengths to explain it all, in the end you’re still likely to be left scratching your head. Worse, the actual end of the game, even with the meticulous wrap-up of the labyrinthine plot line, still manages to be abrupt and unsatisfying.

Mountain Crime: Requital is an odd duck. On one hand, it’s an expertly designed and beautifully illustrated title that’s great for players who want a reliable hidden object gaming experience. On the other, and for those of us who play a lot of games in this genre, it’s a confusing story layered on a pile of tired clichés and isn’t really worth the effort. Ultimately, your results will vary, depending on your expectations and the level of experience you have with hidden object titles.

Edited reference accessed HERE. Originally posted by Nellie Johnson on 20th Dec 2011 . Edited by Whiterabbit-uk 26th Aug 2017.

Review 2:

Here's something I never thought I'd say about a hidden object game: Mountain Crime: Requital's biggest problem is that it may be a little too ambitious.

Obviously, that's probably putting things in slightly loftier terms than they deserve. But here are the basic facts. Mountain Crime: Requital's biggest problems are its cut scenes and its voice acting — or, you know, two of the things you need least in a hidden object game.

I mean, I get that Alawar Entertainment wanted to create some kind of immersive game world, and good on them for making something more than a bunch of static locations where you search endlessly for weirdly incongruous items. But after enduring scene after scene of people moving around awkwardly, interacting via strained, stilted dialogue, I truly believe that the static option would have been better. After all, the game does a great job of building mystery and telling a story just through random newspaper clippings and personal notes scattered around each location, while every time an animated cut scene shows up, momentum grinds to a halt. Pages of text and exposition may seem antithetical to the very nature of modern video games, but in this case, there's no doubt they would've been the better option.

Particularly because if you can get past those flaws, you'll find a pretty fun game underneath. As I said, the game does an excellent job of building a mysterious narrative just through the objects you find hunting around the various locations, and I can honestly say that — terrible cut scenes aside — I was genuinely interested in the game's story, and I wanted to know how it all ended.

More importantly, though, the game's puzzles are solid — not to mention varied. Mountain Crime: Requital may be advertised as a hidden object game, but it doesn't limit itself to just searching around pictures for random items. There are a few places where you genuinely need to think things out logically, and I'm going to come right out and admit that I wouldn't have finished the game if it hadn't been for a combination of the PC version walk through which you can find HERE and the "Skip" option that comes up after several unsuccessful puzzle attempts.

Edited reference accessed HERE. Originally posted by Matthew Pollesel on 24th June 2013. Edited by Whiterabbit-uk 26th Aug 2017.

If you have a problem installing or activating or getting Mountain Crime: Requital to work please visit the problems section, which I've now incorporated into the FAQ's thread, and which you can find HERE

Other Reviews and Videos of Mountain Crime: Requital:

You can see Steam community reviews (that are mainly positive) of Mountain Crime: Requital HERE, and you can see some game play videos HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE and HERE. If you’re having problems progressing through the game you can find a walk through HERE, and there's around 50 images you can check out via a slide show HERE

Conclusion:

The game has a good atmosphere with a nice environment , however the story is rather convoluted and has an abrupt, nonsensical ending. Despite the poor reviews I’d still check this out, especially if you love HOG adventures. Personally I had enough of these HOG’s several years ago after playing literally hundreds of them. I even cancelled my Big Fish subscription because virtually every game being released to BFG was a HOG at the time and I ended up with a years worth of game credits which were basically wasted on games I wasn’t really bothered about simply because most of what BFG had on offer were HOG’s and my least favorite arcade genre Time Management games . That said, I’d give this a reasonable 7 out of 10 for game play and decent graphics.:)

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank MyPlayCity for giving away Mountain Crime: Requital and also to the game giveaway team, as always, for securing other ways to get free games.

Issues getting the game to install or work?

If you are having problems installing today's game check the FAQ's thread HERE and read through the communities comments because sometimes fixes have already been posted, for example, a common issue seen since the Themida wrapper was introduced three years ago is that some community members installation of the game is blocked by their security (usually an error message is flagged for example 'The executable is corrupted' even though in reality it is not) because Themida code has been known to hide malware, so as a precaution some anti malware programs will block and even delete the suspect installation files even though they are actually free from malware. This issue can be solved either by rebooting your computer in safe mode with networking or a quicker method is to temporarily turn off your security software to allow the installation. In the almost 11 years this game giveaway site has been operating there has 'never' been a game given away that was infected with malware.

If for any reason you want to contact the giveaway team, for example, you have a game to offer the community, or are unable to download the latest game or other issues that the FAQ's thread or these comments don't cover or solve you can do so HERE

If you miss today's game giveaway you can always get the game via MyPlayCity 24/7 HERE; or If you prefer to purchase the game you can get it HERE via Steam for £1.99/$2.99; (it also comes in a five game bundle HERE, that includes Behind the Reflection 2: Witch's Revenge, Mountain Crime: Requital, Vampire Saga: Pandora's Box, Weird Park: Broken Tune, Twisted Lands: Shadow Town and costs £6.99/$9.99. Or you can get the game via Big Fish Games HERE.

Useful Information not related to today's game giveaway:

Don't forget to check out the Epic game store HERE for the latest freebie Sundered: Eldritch Edition , (a chaotic hand­-drawn metroidvania where you resist or embrace ancient eldritch powers, a challenging and unique take on a classic genre from the creators of Jotun, now with local co-op!); next Thursday we will be getting Horace a huge platforming adventure which pushes the boundaries of the genre with a profound story of a small robot learning of life, the universe and Douglas Adams, plus there are more free games over at Indie Gala HERE.

You can also get a Steam key for the 4 player party game Headsnatchers HERE (worth £11.39/$14.99/€ 12.49) free for a limited time (ends on Sunday at 6pm UK time) and must be redeemed on Steam before the 16th January 3pm UK time. If you are looking for a decent bundle well worth getting that contains a decent selection of triple A and indie arcade style games check out the latest Humble Choice bundle (formerly the monthly humble bundle) HERE; it includes 12 games of which you can choose 11 for the princley sum of only £12 (or the US equivalent); total worth of those games at this time (none are on sale) over £250. This months games include Middle-Earth: Shadows of War, Graveyard Keeper, Two Point Hospital, Dirt Rally 2.0 + 3 DLC, Street Fighter V, Bad. North: Jotun Edition, Trailmakers, Unrailed, Whisper of a Machine, Them's Fightin' HerdsMages of Mystralia and Grip Combat Racing + 1 DLC plus a DRM free game and while subscribed access to a trove of almost 100 DRM free games.

Finally, check out Delenns thread over in the Game Discussion forums for details of other free games and offers HERE