Mountain Crime: Requital:

In Brief:
A Hidden Object game.

Mountain Crime: Requital has been given away twice before; the first time was the 27th August 2017 where it received a positive 91% from 34 votes with 26 comments which you can see HERE. It was given away again on the 11th January 2020 where it received a positive 95% from 42 votes with 7 comments which you can see HERE.

You can see a few videos of game play HERE, HERE , HERE and HERE

The Game:

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 and reposted 23rd June 2022.

You can see another review of the game via the last time this was given away HERE. The referenced page no longer exists, but the review gives a different perspective on the game, so may be worth reading, especially if you're not sure about downloading todays game.

You can also see over 150 very positive Steam community members comments (82% give a thumbs up) about todays game 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 account because virtually every game being released to BFG was a HOG. 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 (at least at that time) . That said, I’d give this a reasonable 7 out of 10 for game play and decent graphics.