Buckingham Palace brings tourists into Great Britain from all over the globe, over 50,000 invited guests pass through the gates every year, and through the iPhone and iPod touch we can now have our own personal tour and solve a mystery plaguing the Royal Family for years.

Review

You start by selecting a room on a map, you enter the room and you are greeted with a little information about how the room is used. You then find the objects listed there, in a room laden with British memorabilia (admittedly there is the odd baseball glove). There are two crowns hidden, and if you find them you can get hints to finding an item if you are stuck. You can choose how you spend your hints as you can see a silhouette, or a full picture of the object, or where the object is. Some of the items you find are used to solve a mini mystery every 3 rooms or so, and the mystery gets deeper as the game goes on. Sometimes the object is right there in front of you but you just can’t see it! The challenging aspect of this game is the mini mystery levels, the clues are there but it’s not always obvious what the next move is.

The graphics in this game are fantastic, as you can see in the screenshots below, the detail in all the rooms is stunning, it definitely gives you a real sense of what Buckingham Palace is like, and captures the darkness of the mystery shrouding the building. The mysterious atmosphere is so important in this game and the graphics simply create it. The only problem I found was that if you zoom into the closest level things get a little blurry.

To find an object you simply click on it and you can zoom in and out to get a closer look around. A recurring problem in a lot of these games is that sometimes when you are perfectly innocently zooming in and out, the application mistakenly accuses you of clicking on the wrong things. Unlike other hidden object games though, there is no timing involved so you are not penalised, you just receive a nasty noise through your earphones.

The fly in the ointment is the sound. This is where the game sadly lets itself down. The background music is dreary, grey and is enough to make even the happiest of people feel melancholy. The sound when you find an item is an awkward discord noise and doesn’t make you feel rewarded in the slightest. I have to admit it drove me mad so I played the game mute to save my sanity. If I could change anything about this app, it would be the sound. An update with a different soundtrack would make all the difference.

Recommendation

I would recommend Buckingham Palace: Hidden Mystery for the story and the treat of playing the detective. The beautiful imagery created by the graphics are well worth it and the educational value is great as it is a real insight into the British institution.

There is a lite version available and Big Fish games have several other hidden object games available. Buckingham Palace: Hidden Mystery and is available through the App Store right now for $2.99.

Photos

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