Publisher: The Adventure Company
Developer: Trine Games
System requirements: Windows 2000/XP/Vista, 1 GHz Pentium IV or better CPU, 256 MB RAM (512 MB for Vista), 128 MB DirectX 9 on-board graphics or better, 16-bit DirectX 9-compatible sound card, 100 MB hard-drive space
Genre: Hidden Object
Release date: Available now

The adventure game genre, like all of the others, has evolved in the last few decades. It started out with just text in the legendary Infocom games of the 1990s, then moved to slide shows such as Myst, and then point-and-click adventures, with LucasArts leading the way with the Monkey Island series and Grim Fandango. And now, the genre takes a sidestep into the world of Waldo with developer Trine Games’ The Hardy Boys: The Perfect Crime, a hidden-object game that mixes a bare-bones story with simple (but often frustrating) gameplay.

Teen detectives Joe and Frank Hardy are visiting their favorite local coffee shop when one of their motorcycles is stolen. Their efforts to recover their wheels lead them to corruption in city government, sabotage at the nearby carnival and international smuggling, which they uncover by sorting through a series of messy scenes for clues and evidence that could lead them to the perpetrator.

Gameplay in Hardy Boys is as basic as filling in the daily word-find puzzles in the newspaper. You’re presented with a static scene filled with objects, ranging from things that you’d expect to find in the scene to items that have no business being there. You’re given a list of objects to find, which you eliminate from the list by clicking on them with the mouse. A 12-minute timer ticks down, adding a sense of urgency to the proceedings (if you don’t want to be rushed, the clock can be disabled from the options menu). Once the last item on the list is discovered, the scene shifts to a new location, the clock is reset, the story is advanced through subtitled conversations between characters, and you’re back to finding more items. If time is running short and you need a hint, you can ask for one by clicking the hint button on the left edge of the screen.

Every so often, you also are called upon to complete a minigame to finish a scene. These minigames have you reassembling torn paper messages, connecting wires on circuit boards, creating pathways for electricity on a testing machine or combining chemicals in prescribed sequences. The minigames are valuable in that they offer a diversion for both your eyes and your brain from the bulk of the game, in which you’re doing nothing but searching for and eliminating objects from the scenes. None of them are particularly difficult to master, although a few later in the game might test your patience.

I knew from the start that Hardy Boys was going to be trouble. I had to reboot my PC to complete installation, something I can’t remember the last time I had to do before starting to play a game. And when I reached the menu screen, I noticed that the sound was turned off by default, but turning it on caused the game to crash to my desktop; forcing the game to run as an administrator solved the sound problem. Also, the copy I received didn’t ship with a manual, either in the box or as a PDF on the disk. This wasn’t a huge problem, but having a manual would’ve saved me from having to learn some important facts on my own, such as you’re only allowed three hints per scene. When I finally started to play, it became clear that the developer had attempted to balance the simplicity of the gameplay with headache-inducing frustration. Some of the items in no way resemble their descriptions on the item list, while others are camouflaged by displaying them in silhouette or placing them against a background item of the exact same color as the object of your search. Also, the laws of gravity apparently have no effect in the world of the Hardy Boys; items can be seen suspended in mid-air in almost every scene. The story, although filled with witty banter between the boy sleuths and their friends, is totally absurd; only in a parallel universe ruled by Walt Disney would two teenage boys be allowed to investigate crimes such as these, and with the local sheriff’s blessing. And with more than 50 scenes to search, the game feels endless, even though it only took me a couple of hours to finish.

The Hardy Boys: The Perfect Crime would be a good idea as a Flash game that you can spend a few minutes playing at the office when the boss isn’t looking. But as a full-scale adventure game, it’s a boring failure that left me with a throbbing headache and a sore neck from craning closer to the screen to find the one object I needed to move along. As more of these hidden-object games are released, the stories attached to them need to become more involving and the visual presentation more sophisticated, or they’ll suck the fun right out of a genre that has hung on by its fingernails for years.

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