Here With the Clues logo

CRL £24.95 * Mouse

Here is a game that is out of the ordinary. It’s a murder mystery based on a package presented by Dennis ‘The Devil Rides Out’ Wheatley. The idea of the pack is that you get a load of photographs, pieces of evidence, letters and other bumpf and have to solve a murder – and once you reckon you know who did it, you open a sealed enveloped and see if you’ve got the solution right.

So how do you play this on a computer? Well, what CRL have done is digitise all the info from the pack and the player accesses the info by clicking on various parts of the screen which shows all the stuff laid out on a table.

The plot, then. You are the Assistant Commissioner of the anti-terrorist squad in pre-war London. A murder has just been committed in a nightclub. This proves to be messier than it at first sounds: the anti-terrorist squad has been watching the premises for a while because some known IRA sympathizers have been using the club, which has a secret room at the rear, for their meetings.

The murdered man is one Serge Orloff, owner of the club, who is also in with the gang of 16 subversives. The problem was, Serge had been helping the police with their inquiries because he was afraid of being deported back to Russia for other crimes.

After reading the reports from your assistant, who believes the murder was comitted by a member of the group, you are left with two things to do. Firstly, identify the murderer and secondly, discover which members of the group were in the secret room at the time of the murder. The second part of the task is necessary because explosives and so on were found in the secret room: so they can then be charged with ‘conspiracy and complicity in the manufacture of infernal machines for felonious purposes’.

Once that is done, you’ll have to get in touch with CRL who’ll enter you into a competition and reveal the solution.

GRAPHICS AND SOUND

There are a few spot sound effects, which comes as a bit of a surprise. The digitised pictures are fine although a couple are a bit dark. Looks just as good as it needs to look.

LASTING INTEREST

You can really get your teeth into this. It’s going to take you a while to correlate all the clues and come up with the answer so prepare yourself for some pretty heavy sleuthing.

JUDGEMENT

Be prepared to put some work in and you’ll have loads of fun – to save on disk – swapping a second drive is a real bonus. Well put together, a great mystery to solve and something a bit out of the ordinary: well done, CRL!