The Edgar Allan Poe Conspiracy

The mystery surrounding the death of Edgar Allan Poe, the famous 19th century author and poet, will most likely never be solved. But that doesn't mean we can't have a crack at unravelling it ourselves.

Midnight Mysteries: The Edgar Allan Poe Conspiracy lets us do just that, delving into his secrets and marking off the suspects for his supposed murder.

Yet thanks to dull, unvaried gameplay and weak settings, you'll most likely want to halt your investigation early.

While the real-life death of Poe is full of intrigue, The Edgar Allan Poe Conspiracy is enough to bore anyone.

Poe-tic

Led by the ghost of Poe himself, you're tasked with exploring various spooky surroundings, finding clues, and opening up secret passages that may lead to you uncovering the key to his death.

The action plays out as a hidden objects game. You start with a list of objects, and you have to scour each scene and touch each item as you find it.

Once you've found every item, you'll then be able to interact with a special area in the scene, using one or more of the items that you picked up.

Areas are nicely detailed, and sometimes chilling. As you move through each screen, you'll uncover clues that may eventually lead you to the true cause of Poe's death.

While you're searching you can use ravens to highlight troublesome items. And if you choose an item from the bottom of the screen an outline of it will appear on the top, giving you an idea of what it looks like.

Buried at midnight

Unfortunately, Midnight Mysteries doesn't provide enough variety to back up the premise.

Every screen asks you to perform the same task - find 20 random items, move on, find 20 more items, move on, repeat.

We've played plenty of hidden object games that break from this repetitive structure via short mini-games, puzzles, or storytelling. The Edgar Allan Poe Conspiracy does none of these things, opting to throw the same concept at you over and over again.

Interestingly, the game uses Poe's history frequently, asking you to find items that relate to the man and his works.

Yet the same items are used time and time again in multiple scenes, eventually squandering what intrigue they once had.

Leave the mystery unsolved

While the environments are nicely detailed, the majority of them are dark and gloomy.

This adds to the repetitive feel of the puzzles, as every new area looks remarkably similar to the last one.

With some additional puzzle types and a colour scheme that ventured away from the dark side every once in a while, The Edgar Allan Poe Conspiracy could have been an interesting look into the life and death of the mysterious poet.

Instead, it's a journey that will most likely put you off trying hidden object games on the Nintendo DS ever again.

The Edgar Allan Poe Conspiracy

The Edgar Allan Poe Conspiracy may interest diehard fans of the hidden objects genre, but a lack of puzzle variety is an awful turnoff
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Mike Rose
Mike Rose
An expert in the indie games scene, Mike comes to Pocket Gamer as our handheld gaming correspondent. He is the author of 250 Indie Games You Must Play.