I’m learning a lot this year about how a ton of games I played as a kid have definitely not held up well. In the realm of point and click hidden object adventure games, Mortimer Beckett and the Time Paradox definitely falls under that umbrella; I barely even remembered that it exists after years since playing it on WildTangent around my flash game days. Unfortunately, this is about as unremarkable as they get and was a bit of a letdown: and yes, I would almost rather speedrun the Wii version of I Spy Spooky Mansion again before playing this. Almost.
The story’s pretty forgettable as you role play as the Mortimer Beckett, traveling through various historical periods such as the Wild West and the Viking era and collecting pieces of a time bomb while clicking on fragmented anachronisms to restore everything in its place while recollecting artifacts and destroying the temporal anomalies. (Disclaimer: this is actually the 2nd game in the series and from what I recall, the ghosties haunting the mansion in the last installment are the root of the time paradox… but I’m not exactly invested enough in the series to spell it all out when this was actually my starting point.) The tunes are evocative enough of their respective time periods and there is variety in the tracks as you travel between different areas of each era, so props for that. Also, the game’s great at making you feel lost in the tangled web of time by throwing different relics scattered throughout each scene like every scene is set up by the world’s most incompetent history museum curator, so the pervasive feeling that time’s been fucked up definitely shows through.
Regrettably, I think this is also the game’s biggest downfall, as the art style blend between kinda realistic looking graphics and sorta but not quite cartoony graphics has really not aged well. Seriously, a lot of the objects look like they were just copied and pasted from a magazine into another art class collage and there's some real uncanny valley semblance going on throughout the game. In particular, some hidden object fragments stand out significantly while others basically blend into the background, and playing through this has really made me appreciate the attention to detail that I Spy exemplifies throughout all their games and books. Fortunately, there’s an unlimited hint button with a short cool down timer, but this doesn’t alleviate the fact that you’ll also need to drag back restored puzzle objects and fragments to their original location, and many of these locations get lost in the mish mash of stretched, somewhat pixelated graphics from 2008. It’s kind of funny because I ended up using a walkthrough for certain parts, but not because of the puzzles (almost all of which are just some degree of “follow the instructions copied from the notebook”), but because I couldn’t figure out where to drag back objects to restore each timeline. Alas, that’s also probably the most unique feature of the game, because while the “out of time” atmosphere rings true throughout, it also results in most of the historical eras feeling less distinctive and at times, too stereotypical. As a result, It’s definitely one of the hidden object games of all time, and maybe it should have just taken a page from its own book and become lost in the depths of my memory and forever buried in the PC gaming era of one-hour free trials.
The story’s pretty forgettable as you role play as the Mortimer Beckett, traveling through various historical periods such as the Wild West and the Viking era and collecting pieces of a time bomb while clicking on fragmented anachronisms to restore everything in its place while recollecting artifacts and destroying the temporal anomalies. (Disclaimer: this is actually the 2nd game in the series and from what I recall, the ghosties haunting the mansion in the last installment are the root of the time paradox… but I’m not exactly invested enough in the series to spell it all out when this was actually my starting point.) The tunes are evocative enough of their respective time periods and there is variety in the tracks as you travel between different areas of each era, so props for that. Also, the game’s great at making you feel lost in the tangled web of time by throwing different relics scattered throughout each scene like every scene is set up by the world’s most incompetent history museum curator, so the pervasive feeling that time’s been fucked up definitely shows through.
Regrettably, I think this is also the game’s biggest downfall, as the art style blend between kinda realistic looking graphics and sorta but not quite cartoony graphics has really not aged well. Seriously, a lot of the objects look like they were just copied and pasted from a magazine into another art class collage and there's some real uncanny valley semblance going on throughout the game. In particular, some hidden object fragments stand out significantly while others basically blend into the background, and playing through this has really made me appreciate the attention to detail that I Spy exemplifies throughout all their games and books. Fortunately, there’s an unlimited hint button with a short cool down timer, but this doesn’t alleviate the fact that you’ll also need to drag back restored puzzle objects and fragments to their original location, and many of these locations get lost in the mish mash of stretched, somewhat pixelated graphics from 2008. It’s kind of funny because I ended up using a walkthrough for certain parts, but not because of the puzzles (almost all of which are just some degree of “follow the instructions copied from the notebook”), but because I couldn’t figure out where to drag back objects to restore each timeline. Alas, that’s also probably the most unique feature of the game, because while the “out of time” atmosphere rings true throughout, it also results in most of the historical eras feeling less distinctive and at times, too stereotypical. As a result, It’s definitely one of the hidden object games of all time, and maybe it should have just taken a page from its own book and become lost in the depths of my memory and forever buried in the PC gaming era of one-hour free trials.