Insider Tales: The Stolen Venus 2

« Well known Detective Francesca di Porta thought she could finally take a break from her investigations while on a luxury cruise ship. How wrong she was! While onboard The Empire the highlight of an art exhibition is stolen by a thief posing as one of the wealthy guests. Can Francesca solve the mystery onboard and find the culprit or is this going to be one holiday she hoped she never took? Insider Tales: The Stolen Venus 2 labels itself as a sequel to the original game however it has zero in common with the plot of the original. It’s actually the fourth game in the series. This time the series has been handed over to developers Deep Shadows. The idea of using an investigative hidden object game to root out the culprit is quite a nice addition to the series and reminds me of the first two Mystery Case Files games. Gameplay is business as usual although some aspects of the previous game Vanished in Rome such as using a camera to take pictures have been discarded. In some ways Deep Shadows take on the series is much more polished although one rather ugly problem rears its head when the game gets you to make a pizza. It’s a fairly trial and error task but when you get to spreading the sauce it becomes needlessly broken due to the game having collision detection issues with the players dexterity, knowing your exact path of spread. The puzzle is therefore almost impossible to finish, taking a fairly easy puzzle and making it a task in frustration. The puzzle cannot also be skipped either unlike the others. It’s one of the most pointlessly and aggravating puzzles in hidden object history, certainly in the top ten most annoying. It lets an otherwise polished game down. It’s not enough to ruin the game totally but it completely destroys the momentum enough to take the player out of the game and searching online walkthroughs. Probably the best game in the series let down by poor collision detection for one of the puzzles, a shame. »