MCF: Return to Ravenhearst
Just finished playing it yesterday, it is an awesome game,
the soundtrack is like woah, the art is beautiful, the gameplay is fun, the storyline is so cool...
only source of contention was possibly the idiot detective.
The 3 Reasons why the detective is an idiot:
Reason no. 3:
Ok i found a crowbar, a bigass axe, a hammer, a dagger, and what does that woman do?
She throws them all away. Hello? If she'd kept the axe she (i.e the player) wouldn't need to
spend time picking the puzzle lock, she could've just hacked her way through.
Reason no. 2:
So the clock is ticking, there's a big bad who wants her dead,
but the dear detective decides she needs to be neat about her tasks.
Case in point, after using a screwdriver to open up a fuel lid
( a crowbar would have been soo useful)
I take the jar of fuel and try to pour it into the hole. Detective lady is all 'I can't do that'
and i'm like "why not?!"
So I check my inventory and see that there's a funnel there. Oh.
Lady needs to use a funnel to pour the oil in so it won't spill. Yeah we have so much time in this
dark, spooky haunted house to be neat.
And the no. 1 Reason why Madame Master Detective is an idiot:
Oh man she CANNOT outrun a 110 year old dude.
*spoiler alert*
So I enter victor's cottage. The player sees a really, really old guy sitting in a chair. He turns and
spots our detective and he's all like: Hey stinker, you made my daddy mad, now i'm gonna get
you. He then gets up, slow-like, and hobbles towards our detective. Our detective isn't moving
so I'm thinking darn am I gonna have to kill him? Suddenly without warning, detective lady faints. Can I hear a WTC?
She comes to in an attic. This is the hilarious part coz the player gets to see what she wrote in
her logbook regarding the incident and here's what it says essentially:
-She states that she was surprised by Victor. ( haha right, you just keep tellin yourself that, nothin like seein an old guy in a chair to give you a right surprise)
-She comments that he looks about 110 years old. (And you couldn't outrun him? The dude was hobbling)
-She has a picture of Victor hobbling towards her. (She has time to take a photo but not to run?)
One surmises that miss detective was not being very honest in her log.
It's ok to admit you're a wimp ma'am.
Though to give her some credit, Victor must have been really strong,
since he was able to carry our detective and
climb a flight of broken stairs, and climb a rope up to the attic at the same time.
Anyway, while the IQ of the protagonist needs reworking,
yes, reason no 3 was more of a joke reason coz the point of a hidden object game is that we find items anyway.
The game on the whole was much better than the previous 4 (not counting the DS versions.) I mean MCF Ravenhearst and MCF Madam Fate were good, but this game really set the bar higher.
The amount of detail that went into the artwork is truly stunning, from the clues, (consisting of newspaper clippings, posters and even paintings), to the 'eye spy' scenes.
The new soundtrack really adds to the dark Poe-ish atmosphere of the setting and the plot. The little additions like the moving backgrounds and the creepy eastereggs in various scenes make the spook factor of the game just right. It's nothing too over the top. You hear voices and see dolls that blink. Ghostly apparitions make minute appearances.
The puzzles are fun but simple as they tend to follow a 'rubik's cube' kind of theme, with players having to connect lines of light, marbles, slabs etc. Even Charles' door locks aren't exactly the same, with players merely having to find objects, stick them in and solve a pattern. Hopefully MCF will bring back the 'Rube Goldberg Contraption' based puzzles that (in my opinion) were the best kind.
Art Appreciation:
A sign outside the manor.
A section from the logbook
A mysterious well.
One of the 'eye spy' scenes.
A section from the logbook
A mysterious well.
One of the 'eye spy' scenes.
Entrance to the garden.
A clue.
So with MCF 5 ending on a cliffhanger, I and other MCF fans look forward to MCF 6.
