Quest "Children's New Year detective, or Search for missing gifts"

Features of the quest

• The “Children's New Year's Detective” quest is not just a set of disparate puzzles, but a well-thought-out sequential search chain - all quest tasks are connected by a detective storyline.
• Players receive a letter from Santa Claus, informing them that New Year's gifts have mysteriously disappeared. Young detectives will have to show logic, attentiveness and ingenuity to expose the thief and find the stolen gifts. Funny animals - symbols of the eastern horoscope - will help you understand this confusing story.
• In our script there are no long boring backstories and monologues; we offer a bright, fun, humorous adventure with a dynamic plot that immediately draws you into the game.
• This quest can be carried out anywhere - indoors (in an apartment, in a private house, in a cottage, in a school, in a holiday home, in a cafe) or outdoors (in a country house, in a village, in the courtyard of a private house or in nature).
• The kit includes two ready-made search chains: for conducting a quest in an apartment and on the street (in the courtyard of a private house). If you want to use other places or you need to organize a quest for several teams, it is possible to create the desired search chain using a special decoder - for this you need to edit just one page in the template.
• The quest "Children's New Year's Detective" is intended primarily for children 7-13 years old , but it may well please the whole family, including adult players, and become the main entertainment at a family New Year's party.
• Please note that this quest is not a role-playing game. All tasks are based on verbal-intellectual puzzles and various types of ciphers.

View other New Year's quests

With this kit you can:

• conduct a quest for one child
• conduct a quest for one team of children
• play the game as a competition between two teams
• hold a festive game for two teams without competition, with prizes for all players

Top 10 board quests and detective games I played

So, look. I have a fairly long-standing relationship with detectives and quests; I would even call this relationship abusive. In short, it’s unlikely that I could write a blog about how to choose business partners. But, lo and behold, this is not another infobiz blog, but an interesting text about impressions of board games, so it’s better to move on to them.

Anya and I played all the key detective titles and completed them. The situation with this list is similar to the previous one (top 10 campaign games). First, a few mentions, and then I’ll move on to the top ten.

That means who won’t be on the list: Mortum , which hasn’t arrived yet, of course. Detective: City of angels

,
Awkwards guests and Vienna Connection will also have to join the list this fall, I think that they may well promote some of the top ten.
The Pocket Detective fought for tenth place , but they all lost to you know who.

It's better with quests. Questmaster is too simple, and adventure games is also too simple to say, wow, well, they transferred text quests a la Space Rangers to paper, so what? In general, I’m a fan of getting out of the questroom live. I went to all the best ones in Minsk (subjectively) and even made a top selection. In general, that’s all for quests from important mentions.

Let's go to the top.

I’ll also describe everything that we went through below, where we played some add-ons. But the problem with the pictures is that I couldn’t find normal photos in the chat for most games. Since the two of us passed through, I rarely took any photographs of them. Therefore, for clarity, I will take pictures from the Internet

10th place. Detective stories: Fire in Adlerstein

Yes, I am aware that several boxes were released under this series. There are only two in Russian, about seven in English. We only played this one. Reviews about the series are very contradictory, and I myself would say that the series only made it into the top ten because of the poverty of the genre.

What allowed her to get into the top ten? The idea in this particular box pleased me. Inside it’s just a detective case, in a folder, there are no contacts, no interactions, just a mountain of different documents sent to you by a journalist who is accused of arson. He conducted an investigation, formed a list of suspects, but did not have time to complete the case, because he himself became a suspect.

At first we experienced a slight shock: what should we do? Then, we figured out all the logic and the picture came together. For some reason, it was absolutely inappropriate that there was a children's code in the box, it was out of touch with the investigation and looked alien, but for the general idea it can be given a top ten. Will we try other cases from the series? Don't know. It may very well not be, but a one-time experience is not bad.

I liked how the ending was done: at any time you can stop the investigation, go to the quarry code and name the criminal. And then the game will tell you whether you are right or wrong and, if you wish, it will make a detailed analysis of who is to blame for everything and why the others are not to blame.

Tenth place - for the idea. But the execution is far from ideal.

Anticipating your questions, why did Adlerstein make it into the top ten, but Pocket Detective did not? The first season of Pocket Detective seemed too simple to us, and in some places too similar to Trzewiczek's Detective (albeit cut down to one deck). I don’t want to offend anyone, the idea is working, but for us the game was somehow simple and somewhat secondary. It is quite possible that the next season will be cooler, but the first one loses to Adlerstein at least at the level of idea.

This is what the contents of the box look like: a folder with a crime case, in it there are a bunch of different papers, evidence, and so on.

9th place. Crime scene

For a very long time I did not dare to get acquainted with this detective, but in my opinion he is one of the highest rated. The main feature of this detective story is its complete digitalization. While conducting an investigation, you will have all the information in the application, you will examine the crime scene on your phone, scan item cards to determine whether there is such evidence at the crime scene. And in general, you will spend 90% of the game staring at your phone and pointing the camera at different QR codes.

We were given the opportunity to play, we went through the base and a couple of cases from Noir. At first I liked the process due to its novelty, but then I quickly fell out of love with it. For greater immersion, we broadcast the application to the TV, this helped not just one person (the phone owner) follow the game, but everyone conducting the investigation.

After playing and feeling the game from different sides, I was finally convinced of two big disadvantages. The first is that most cases are on rails. The first hypothesis is usually correct and all you do throughout the game is try to find evidence to confirm it. At first we didn’t believe that everything was so simple and tried to find something else, but as it turned out there was no point. These last-minute insights have never happened.

The second disadvantage is the actual way the application works. Some interaction chains are written disgustingly. Let's look at interrogating a character, for example. When we talk to him, we can ask him about other cards in the game by scanning their Q-ar codes. And very often we receive in response the most stupid answers like “oh, what did you think of that?” And I’m kind of asking a dude about another dude, I didn’t think of anything, I want to know whether you know each other or not, what do you know about him in general. Or there was a case when we asked a guy about another character from the game, and he answered “yes, he helped me with such and such.” But it’s as if we didn’t even know that such-and-such happened at all, according to the plot we had not yet reached this information and his answer sounded as premature as possible, the criminal took it out of the blue and confessed, and also ratted out his accomplice. But we didn’t know about this crime yet, we were investigating something else. As you have often realized, when you bring something up for scanning, the application gives you something completely different from what you expected to see. And this is how things are not only with interrogations, but also with inspection of crime scenes, when you see a fictitious bottle in the picture and try to pick up a card on how the developers encrypted this bottle this time: a bottle, dishes, alcohol, or even garbage (this has happened).

Why, with all these disadvantages, is the game in ninth place? If you organize the space correctly, it plays relatively atmospherically. Even though things are on track, there is still fun in the process. In terms of emotions and potential (and also because they have already taken over even temporary eras), the game deserved ninth place in this collection at the moment, at least, I liked everything that was not included in the top for various reasons even less.

This is roughly what the game looks like in progress, although in our case everything was more chaotic

8th place. MicroMacro

Well, at this point it should become clear how weak the performances in Adlerstein and Crime Scene are (for me personally), since I rated them lower than MicroMacro. Everything is just like that.

Although MicroMacro is presented as a detective story, it is more of a game of attentiveness. Within each case, you will have to track the movement of one or more characters across a large map in order to solve the crime. The whole route in different time periods is immediately on the map of this strange town with a cool drawing, and the main difficulties are not to confuse a guy in a hat with a similar guy in a different hat, or not to confuse two similar cars.

Nevertheless, emotionally I liked this game more than the previous two. The game was fast and fun. Perhaps we will even buy a new box, but perhaps not.

It is also obvious that the authors did not immediately release ten envelopes with the base box - there are still committed crimes on the map that, if desired, can be tracked and “solved.” Most likely, the envelopes will be delivered to them later, but why these envelopes are needed if you can go through them anyway is unclear. And in general there is not enough content in the game. 16 cases are completed in two evenings, and the cost of a box for this amount of content is not so little. Still, it was funny. Children may also enjoy this game.

Finally, some unexpected advice: hang the map on the wall; when it hangs vertically, it’s more pleasant and easier to play.

The central element of the game is a huge map with a lot of small details

7th place. Elementary

The gap between 8th place and seventh place is really big. I hope that Mortum, Detective: city of angels and the Vienna Messenger are not a hat, burst into this top and put everything in its place here. And maybe something else will come out in a year.

Okay, back to Elementary. We went through all 15 boxes that were in Russian. Among them there were both cool ones (the entire 4th season is about the Wild West) and disgusting ones (One-way ticket is too specific). Almost all of us played together, which works quite well for this series.

We passed almost all the games with a maximum score, except for a couple that were broken due to typos in the text (there were 1-2 of them, I don’t remember what they were), but what’s most interesting is that often the correct version of the event appeared before the questions were answered and during. So the mechanics of answering questions at the end of the case can be attributed to both minuses and pluses.

Otherwise, in my opinion, this is the best pocket detective (and we tried everything that came out: crimezoom, detective chronicles, and even a second chance), albeit with a dancing level of interest in the cases. Great for playing 2-3 boxes per evening. The main thing is not to make a mistake with the first boxes, so as not to get hate right from the start.

The three most recent boxes. Already passed

6th place. Agency Time

Further more. This year we were able to try out the Time Agency. We played only the base and then played together again (I think that was rather a plus for this game). Time Agency is a quest game with narrative elements and ameri elements (all sorts of dice rolls to check the characteristics of the characters). On the one hand, the game looks expensive and rich, but on the other hand, the characters here are represented by some kind of round plastic tubes that don’t really add much to the atmosphere. To thoroughly play the game, one basic box is not enough: there is only 1 case and components that will be useful in other cases, so if you want to play the game, you will have to splurge a little. I counted 12 separate additions with one case inside, but I could have made a mistake somewhere in the calculations.

So, we went through a basic case about a mental hospital. In the game, we supposedly find ourselves in some time period in order to prevent something like time distortion (in the first case, this moment seemed far-fetched). We inhabit some local characters and try to figure out the situation. This moment was implemented in a funny way, since we went to a psychiatric clinic, we moved into patients: each character had their own weaknesses. Some are too aggressive, some are hallucinating. A certain number of time units are allotted to complete the case. If you don't have time to complete the task, start over. The mechanics work, but not everyone will be ready to do this. We were lucky, we passed everything the first time (with the highest score, faq e). This mechanic in general, as for me, is the weak point of the game - there are a lot of dead-end plot branches and often the fact that they are dead-end is not obvious at all.

Could the same gameplay be captured with cheaper components? Yes! Was it possible to fit several cases into one box? Certainly! Why didn't they do this? No idea.

It’s very unlikely that you’ll ever have the chance to play the rest of the series, so even though the game is quite good, it’s morally difficult to rank it higher. It seemed that she was not worth the money.

Basic box contents

5th place. Sherlock Holmes

Sherlock Holmes is a game from 1981. They changed his shoes, changed his clothes, let him out, he shot again, and according to the same scheme, new boxes began to be released one by one (their ratings got worse and worse). We have only played the very first box in the entire series so far.

How does this even play? There is some kind of background to the detective case, there is this week’s newspaper (there is a lot of all sorts of content, most often useless, but a couple of lines will definitely help in the investigation) and, in fact, that’s all. After reading the background and newspaper, players should go to the addresses in the Address Investigation Booklet (sometimes a city map and London directory can help). On your turn, you choose where you are going and read the corresponding paragraph. You can walk almost endlessly. When you decide that you know what’s going on, go on to answer the questions, answer, score a certain number of points and find out what really happened. The game also likes to humiliate at this stage and say “Sherlock Holmes revealed everything in two addresses!”

We went through Sherlock in several sittings; most of the cases were completed between four of us. All this was a long time ago, as far as I can see from the points we scored the least in the third, ninth and tenth. I still remember how I was bombarded by the tenth case: I was not very experienced then and for some reason I thought to myself that this would be some kind of quint essence of the whole box, that the tenth case would somehow unite all the cases and become a logical conclusion, but it was just an ordinary thing, and in my opinion not very interesting.

I don’t really want to spoil it, but from such a serious box you don’t expect hypnosis to pop up somewhere here.

Sherlock was not easy to play, even though we scored an average of 70/100 in all cases, it was a bit difficult. Partly due to the ornate style, partly due to the fact that this is essentially a ton of text in which I missed one detail - that's it, hello. Sometimes it felt like you were just reading a book rather than doing research and you had to guess where to go rather than think logically.

Maybe we’ll play something from Sherlock again, but I didn’t fit into the pre-orders, I’m not super actively looking for boxes, we’ll see, in general.

Nevertheless, a well-deserved fifth place for the wonderful Victorian narrative and at least half of the interesting cases (strangely enough, I liked the very first one the most).

There are already 4 of these Sherlocks of yours. 2 have been localized and 2 still need to be

4th place. Unlock!

A series of quests that for some reason did not receive as many localizations as it deserves. Only one box with three stories was published in Russian. Every business is a deck of cards. The maps contain both locations and riddles. There may also be items that need to be combined with locations and with each other to get something new (for example, if you combine a conditional bucket and conditional water, you get a bucket of water). Each case was different both in theme (as well as in art and atmosphere) and in the direction of the riddles; each had its own special feature.

In order for the quest to be played, you will need an application in which it is very convenient to check whether objects are combined with each other, enter codes and all that.

One of the Russian localization decks is actually a team-based game. The two teams start at opposite ends of the island, must meet, and cannot exchange information (at least at first). We played the entire unlock together and got a lot of positive emotions, the riddles were really interesting, and not passable like in some questmaster. Each deck also had its own plot and conveyed an atmosphere (which is more difficult, for example, with the box from place number 3).

Purely mechanically, I would say that unlock is the best tabletop quest we've played, but since we only have three things under our belt, we can't rank it higher. I’ll definitely get at least a couple of English cases when I can travel abroad normally. Also, by the way, sometimes the unlock boxes come out with themed boxes (for example, there is a box with three Star Wars quests, isn’t it beautiful?)

There were also a lot of unlocks. But they localized only one box with three cases: about the sausage, about the laboratory and about the island

3rd place. EXIT

And here is His Majesty Exit. We have gone through 12 localized boxes, the last two have also been purchased and are waiting in the wings. The history of our acquaintance with this series is two-stage. Once upon a time, I won Exit about ancient Egypt, we went through it together with Anya and it was very difficult, painful and difficult for us. We used a lot of hints, and the next day, to make sure we completed the quests properly, we went and completed the questroom.

About a year went by, I won another exit box, and it had one of those riddles that had the wow factor. Well, if you have been through exits, then you should be aware that in each box there is a riddle that forces you to go beyond the ordinary. Either you need to turn the box, then you need to cut something that is usually not cut, then you need to turn off the light in the room. And there was something like that there. In general, we really liked it (or maybe we just became smarter or work better as a team) and we bought everything that was in Russian. We've passed, but now we don't miss new items.

The best box in the series is Secret Laboratory, the puzzles are balanced, there is a wow effect. With the worst ones, everything is more complicated - there are a couple that are too easy, there are a couple of boxes in which a couple of riddles are ruined due to translation or other printing features (for example, in a box about a museum, one of the riddles could not be solved due to the fact that the colors were different where needed from those that should have been). I remember exactly that I didn’t really like the ones about the jungle, the room of panic and Mississippi. In general, the latest exits were somehow weaker, but so far the riddles continue to please in some places - you can definitely get them for that price.

What the series lacks is narrative. Although the authors are trying to add this and are experimenting with serving the material in portions, it still looks unnatural.

But since we don’t have better quests in Russian, we’ll continue to go through these ones, because they perform their function well and have definitely earned third place in the selection.

Not all Exit. The original boxes are elongated. The localization is square, sometimes it breaks some mysteries

2nd place. Detective: Modern Investigation

And here is a detective from Trzewiczek. I hesitated to buy it for a long time because I was embarrassed by the dominance of the digital version of the game over the offline one. Then we had already completed Sherlock and were thinking about what to investigate next. Then the pandemic started, I had a lot of free evenings, so I took this box.

In total, at the moment we have gone through the base, Los Angeles, Promodelo, the suburbs to the base and dig deeper. Detective Season 1 For Natural Reasons, they decided not to take it (subtle irony about the fact that the authors of the game released the promotional case For Natural Reasons for free, and then released a box in which there were only 3 cases, for money, and this is one of them).

In the base, we play as a private detective organization that begins to investigate an almost harmless case, but gradually finds itself in the center of a very specific story that goes back all the way to the Second World War. Every case has a backstory and a deck of cards. Sometimes you have to look into an online database: enter fingerprints into it, read secret and not so secret documents. For each investigation, you also choose characters who will help you move through the plot with their abilities.

The base game is fire. Although the theme of the base campaign is very specific, it is put together very well. And the application integration was cool. It was a great game for two people - I was responsible for the application, Anya for the chronology and other notes. The only recommendation is to try not to take long breaks between completing cases, because information from the first cases will also be useful in the last ones. Playing a basic detective, we felt like detectives more than in all other games on the list. The game very rarely gives you answers on a silver platter: almost everything can and should be reached logically.

I liked the additional LA less - partly because of how finished the application looks (yes, the era is like a non-computer one, so everything is conveyed correctly, but it still looks poor), and the things themselves are kind of overdone. It took too much effort not to get confused about the names and relationships between the characters.

Dig deeper and you'll reach the bottom (you've dug to the bottom!). Although Mr. Davio (Sifol, Pandemic Legacy) is involved in the box. He came up with a good mechanic for interrogating witnesses, but the case itself turned out to be insipidly simple, with this we said goodbye to the series of games for now and we are unlikely to play further games in the series (although... who knows where the series will turn next, maybe we’ll try Vienna Messenger, although the topic is not ours at all).

These are the contents of the base box.

1 place. Arkham Mysteries

Oh, I know someone will get burned in this place. Many people hate this game because it is not a completely legal remake of Sherlock with a Lovecraft theme. And I agree with them. But it’s worth admitting that the mechanics also added some finishing touches here. Take, for example, the limitation on the number of addresses visited, and also the fact that at some addresses completely different events occur in the morning, afternoon and evening! You still need to plan when to come. And add to all this the Lovecraftian setting, which adds atmosphere.

In the box we have almost the same things as in Sherlock - newspapers, a contact book, a directory. But there are also a couple of innovations - a timer, a deck of secret item cards that can be found in scenarios to gain access to special chapters of the case. And all the cases are connected by a single plot thread, one way or another.

Some people complain in reviews that the cases from Secrets are much less logical. I wouldn't say that. I remember exactly that I didn’t really like the case when a little girl was chasing us (but there was also an unusual mechanic - a chase), but most of the cases went very well. It's also worth noting that we went through the box in two sittings and for the second time we went through 5 or 6 cases in a row. I really liked the fact that the characters intersected in the cases, as well as the fact that they had some kind of common plot. The last case here unites all the cases in the box and essentially depends on it - whether you ultimately defeated all this evil or not. We lost two cases before the last one, and we pulled out the last one as beautifully and elegantly as possible, which is why it was etched in our memory as a big and strong positive emotion.

Overall, in terms of emotions, this box turned out to be a level higher than everything else in this collection. And even after a while, no one could interrupt her. And Professor Armitage behaved better than Sherlock Holmes.

Mechanically, Arkham Mysteries is inferior to Detective, in terms of brain-breaking it is inferior to EXIT, but they pulled this top largely thanks to the atmosphere (take at least the beautifully voiced conclusions and endings of cases), oddly enough for this genre of games. Actually, before The Secrets of Arkham, I didn’t particularly like Lovecraft, so I sometimes played Ancient Horror, and after them we had an overdose and now we play in this setting very rarely, because not a single game in this universe gives those emotions, even Mansions.

Contents of the Mysteries of Arkham box

Well, this is how the top ten turned out. It’s very cool that the detective and quest genres are developing in a tabletop format. I think you will agree that in these genres not everything has been said yet and they have room to develop. I, like hundreds of other unknown people, are also working on desktop prototypes, one of them is a detective story, and another is a quest. Let's see what fate awaits this top, and what fate awaits my prototypes. If I don’t abandon the blog, I’ll update the top. In the meantime - until new longreads!

Top 9 detectives and quests that I have completed so far (September 2021)

My other texts: Telegram channel Aboardage (reports from our League of Board Games, my reviews of board games and much more) Collection on Teser (add me as a friend, though I don’t know why) Top 9 difficult games I played (May 2021) 27 games that I will buy part 1 part 2 part 3 9 old games that are never localized, which is a pity 27 non-duel games that are great for two players 20 good games that I sold, part 1 part 2 9 board games that there are not enough additions 30 must-have additions, part 1 part 2 part 3 10 most popular games in our board club for 3 years #on shelves with Anya (September 2021) 10 campaign games that I completed (September 2021) part 1 part 2

Set design

Players receive a letter from Santa Claus, informing them that New Year's gifts have mysteriously disappeared.

Thanks to a special decoder, hints and a prize for completing the quest can be hidden in any convenient place.

completing assignments

Police Quest 1-4 (1987-1993)

Police detective quests from Sierra, dedicated to the confrontation between cop Sonny Bonds and drug dealer Jesse Baines. In the fourth part, the main character becomes detective John Carey, who has to find and catch a particularly dangerous serial maniac. Police Quest is meticulous in depicting the workdays of police officers (and detectives), including the need to attend “flight meetings.”

Warm, lamp quests of the 80s

Description of tasks

(key places where you can hide hints and surprises are indicated in brackets)

1. Letter from Santa Claus (chair, bench, your option ). The beginning of the investigation is a letter from Santa Claus, which talks about missing gifts.
2. Search for evidence (mirror, bush, your option). An interesting logic puzzle.
3. Alibi, or who is not to blame (book, boot, your option). A fun task for ingenuity and quick imaginative thinking.
4. Continuing the investigation (TV, hood, your option). Colorful circular puzzle. To find out the next search location, players need to collect it correctly.
5. Interrogation of the Rooster (newspaper, gate, your option). An original mindfulness task. To read the hint, you need to restore the sequence of the pictures.
6. Interrogation of the Rabbit (bed, bag, your option). A fun observation task; you need to find the wrong fragments in the picture.
7. Interrogation of the Rat (bag, pole, your option). An interesting arithmetic problem.
8. Interrogation of the Monkey (plant, tree, your option). Entertaining colorful cipher.
9. Interrogation of the Horse (kitchen box, porch, your choice). A tricky puzzle for your ingenuity.
10. Interrogation of the Dog (washing machine, wall, your option). Mirror encrypted riddle.
11. Exposing the thief (window sill, fence, your option). An original task, the highlight of this kit.
12. Confession of the kidnapper. Search for gifts (wardrobe, car, your option). A festively decorated final task. You need to read the hint using the key.

Attention! For those who want to use other places or organize a quest for several teams, the kit offers a decoder template in which you only need to edit one page.

We also include a template for a letter from Santa Claus (which, according to the script, should be placed at the final search point, along with the gifts). You can replace our universal text and write your own, individual one.

The kit is offered in electronic form - you need to print everything you need yourself on a color printer (the postcard and tasks look great on regular office paper).

Tesla Effect: A Tex Murphy Adventure, 2014

Detective quest in cyber-punk style. The action takes place in San Francisco after World War III. Private investigator Tex Murphy wakes up in his office at the Ritz Hotel. He is severely beaten, but what is worse is that he has amnesia, as a result of which the last seven years of his life have disappeared from his memory. In addition, his girlfriend Chelsea disappeared without a trace. Now Tex needs to find Chelsea and his memories, and at the same time understand how all this is connected with the missing inventions of Nikola Tesla.

Tex Murphy was extremely popular in the 90s and quite successfully rose from the ashes almost 20 years later

The Dead, 2015

“The Act” is a detective quest in reverse. The main “hero” will have to kill his sister for the sake of the inheritance - and at the same time avoid deserved punishment. You can get rid of your nasty sister using many tools and methods, blaming your other “favorite” relatives and even your butler.

After killing your sister, you can inherit a great Gothic mansion

Overclocked: Justified Cruelty, 2007

Another detective from House of Tales. Psychiatrist David McNamara investigates the mysterious cases of amnesia among five New York teenagers. Which leads him into the wilds of the Pentagon and the sinister military experiments carried out there... Well, I don’t understand why the translators didn’t translate the word Overclocked in the title of this wonderful German quest. “Zombified,” for example, would be great.

Together with David, we must understand that violence begets violence

Black Dahlia, 1998

A live-action detective quest that puts forward its own version of the still unsolved murder of actress Elizabeth Short, known as Black Dahlia. Dennis Hopper, Christopher Walken and Jonathan Rhys-Davies appeared in the game. In addition, Black Dahlia has interesting puzzles, an intriguing plot and a noir, oppressive atmosphere.

Of course, the murder of Black Dahlia was not without a terrible sect

Mystery of Druids, 2001

“The Secret of the Druids” is a detective and mystical quest from the Germans House of Tales. Charred human bones belonging to a ritual murder victim have been found in a London park. Detective Brent Halligan takes over the investigation. The evidence leads him to the sinister Lord Sinclair, who is the head of the powerful ancient order of Druids. To stop Sinclair, Brent will have to do anything, including breaking the laws of time and space.

Brent Holligan. Man and detective

Alfred Hitchcock: the Final Cut, 2001

“Last Take” is a detective quest inspired by Hitchcock films. Detective psychic Joseph Shemley must deal with the mysterious disappearances that regularly occur on the estate of a major pharmaceutical magnate, who is also an ardent fan of the great director. After completing the game, you will learn how to masterfully bake an apple pie, and you will also most likely begin to hate starlings.

Joseph stands in vain so recklessly close to this suspicious scarecrow...

Sherlock Holmes: Crimes & Punishments, 2014

Sherlock Holmes is still the best detective of all time. And the game Crimes & Punishments is deservedly considered the best game about Sherlock Holmes. Solve 6 complex cases, relying on shaky intuition and reinforced concrete deduction? Elementary Watson! By the way, the name of the game is a reference to the corresponding novel by Dostoevsky. A portrait of the writer himself can also be seen in the game.

Ukrainian developers managed to create extremely authentic Holmes and Watson

Ripper, 1996

“The Ripper” is another detective quest in the spirit of cyber-punk. It's 2040. Jack the Ripper rose from the dead and began to do what he loved - disembowel pretty girls. The police are powerless against the maniac. Journalist Jack Quinlan, whose girlfriend miraculously managed to escape from the clutches of the killer, begins a private investigation. An interesting feature of Ripper is that puzzles, clues and the main villain in the game are assigned randomly, that is, randomly. Also in the game there is a cybernetic reality, occupying as much as 40 (forty!) gigabytes. Oh the future.

The Ripper is already lying in wait for us in virtual space. Forty gigabytes is no joke!

Hotel, 2010

A private detective from New York, Bridget, will have to investigate the strange things going on in the respectable French Bellevue Hotel. One of the wealthy guests suddenly fell into a coma, and then her jewelry was stolen. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Gradually, Bridget realizes that a real sect is involved in the atrocities happening in Bellevue...

Bridget will have to spend a lot of time exploring every nook and cranny of the gloomy hotel to unravel the secrets of its guests.

Murdered: Soul Suspect, 2014

Detective O'Connor is dead. However, this will not prevent him from completing his investigation dedicated to the search and capture of the Beller - a supernatural maniac who plagues his victims not only during their lifetime, but also after death.

Despite his death, the detective has not lost his optimism, which will be very useful to him in his investigation.

Kathy Rain, 2021

Sophomore journalism student Katie Raine returns to her hometown to investigate the sudden and mysterious death of her beloved grandfather. Which leads to unexpected results - the amateur investigation of an aspiring journalist turns into a pixelated resemblance to the TV series Twin Peaks.

The further you go, the more strange forms Katerina’s investigation takes on.

Face Noir, 2013

A noir detective quest from Italy, quite reliably recreating the atmosphere of America in the 1930s and the Great Depression. A private detective is accused of a murder he did not commit. The banal plot gradually acquires interesting and unexpected details and leads to an unpredictable ending.

True to the title of the game, our detective has a really dark face