Publisher: White Zebra
Developer: White Zebra
System requirements: Windows XP/Vista; 1.5 GHz CPU; 256 KB RAM; 3D graphics card; 100 MB hard-drive space
Genre: Hidden Object/Puzzle
Release date: Available now

Who said adventure gaming is dead? Every time the genre seems to be on its last legs, it rises, Phoenix-like, from the ashes in a slightly new form and starts to compete yet again for our casual-gaming dollars. It’s only appropriate, then, that indie developer White Zebra should entitle their latest hidden object/puzzle hybrid The Mysterious Past of Gregory Phoenix, which neatly combines two potentially boring types of adventure gaming and ends up being pleasantly engaging.

Young Gregory Phoenix has inherited a letter from his grandfather, with an admonishment that he not open it until the next eclipse. When the day finally arrives, he finds inside the envelope a key to his grandfather’s isolated cabin. Inside, Gregory and his girlfriend find a book detailing the history of an ancient kingdom and a magic suit of armor that was dismantled by an evil wizard, who spread the pieces all over the world. Along with the book, Gregory finds a helpful little robot (grandpa was an inventor) and a machine that creates keys to locations where clues leading to the armor segments might be found. But to have the machine make more keys, Gregory has to visit the various countries and sort out the objects he needs from bizarre collections of seemingly unrelated items.

After a brief introduction, Phoenix puts you right to work. Each of the game’s 32 scenes includes a list of items you need to find. These can be as large as grizzly bears or as small as marbles, and some of them are frustratingly difficult to locate among the cornucopia of objects that populate the scenes. When you find an item on the list, left-clicking on it removes it from the scene and from your list. There doesn’t seem to be any penalty assessed for indiscriminate clicking all over the scene, although your cursor starts spiraling on its own if you click incorrectly too many times in a row. There is a hint system that is powered by batteries that you can also find on many of the screens; a meter above your inventory shows you how many hints you have left.

The story of the magic armor rolls out gradually as you complete groups of scenes. After new pages of the tale are revealed, you are presented with minigames that you’d usually find in more traditional adventure games. They are all fairly simple puzzles to solve, although you might have to sit back and study the layout for a moment on some of them. But should any of them stump you, White Zebra has taken pity on you and has allowed you to skip them, moving you along to the armor screens. Here you search the scenes for the scattered shards of the armor piece displayed on the bottom right of the display. Once you find all of them, you’re back traveling the world searching for more items to create more keys to unlock still more armor locations.

Anyone who has played hidden-object games knows that they can be about as interesting as watching paint dry and can give you a serious headache from staring intently at the screen for long periods. Such is not the case with Gregory Phoenix. The developer has wisely included other adventure-game elements to keep the brain from going into vapor lock, and has wrapped it all up in a story that’s surprisingly detailed for this sort of game. The graphics are not what you’d call state of the art, but in this case that could be a good thing; imagine trying to find scalpels or gun holsters buried in a 1920×1200 display, and the throbbing in the temples that it could cause. The almost comic-book approach to the story exposition is visually primitive, and the game’s soundtrack has exactly one extended musical phrase that plays throughout the action, which can become annoying. Also, it’s short enough that it can easily be completed in one sitting, and replay value is practically nil. Fortunately, Phoenix will only cost you $6.99 (download or CD), and you’d be hard pressed to find any PC or laptop on which it won’t play.

The hidden-object adventure genre seems to be thriving; The Mysterious Past of Gregory Phoenix is the third such game I’ve reviewed in the last month. Of the ones I’ve played, Phoenix is far and away the best, mostly because of the effort White Zebra has put into its story and the inclusion of elements other than simple object-hunting. There are a few odds and ends that could’ve been fixed with a more substantial budget, such as the comic-book art and the lack of soundtrack variety, but I was pleasantly surprised by the final package. Hopefully other developers who are planning hidden-object games will play Phoenix first and follow its lead.

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