We all know about the Titanic disaster - there's been much interest in it over the years, with many many documentaries, books and even a film produced about what remains the world's greatest shipping catastrophe. When the ship sank, over 1,500 people died, due to poor direction (into an iceberg) and inadequate planning. Luckily though, the game's nowhere near as much of a disaster.
Hidden Mysteries: Titanic - Secrets of the Fateful Voyage has you playing as Margaret Ashley, a woman who has recently married into high society, to the (insufferable twat) Robert. Letting you explore the Titanic - from the first class cabins full of wood panelling, to the Cafe Parisien, the Titanic's onboard restaurant, and even letting you stroll along the decks of the famous ship, the game plays as a relatively traditional point and click game, as you move from room to room, picking up various objects, that you can use in puzzles to progress through the game. There are also a fair few hidden object scenes throughout the game, that have you hunting for ten of a certain item amongst a densely packed picture but be warned - this isn't a hidden object game, despite what the title may suggest.
It's boarding time. Little did they know...
Most of the puzzles and hidden object scenes you come across are well done - such as the one where you find yourself tidying up a pile of books by fitting them onto a bookshelf - and it's quite a tight fit, so you'll have to properly think about how you arrange those books. There's also one of those little tilt-y ball puzzles, where you have to move a ball round a maze to get it to fall into a hole. In the hidden object scenes you're tasked with finding ten of a certain object (cigarette cards, women's clothing, seasickness pills - things like that), and these are simple enough too, at least for the first six or seven - then the hunting really begins.
But despite it being fine for the most part, not too far into your journey on board the ship, there are a few puzzles that don't really seem to make an awful lot of sense. The first one we struggled with was one where you were presented with a clock, surrounded by four kings and three piles of cards on each side of it. All you had to go by was a rather cryptic explanation, telling you to use the clock to 'move the cards'. Not phenomenally helpful. So after scratching our heads for a bit (and a spot of googling), we finally worked out that you need to move the card with the same number on it as the number the hour hand points to on the clock. But where do you move it to? There's a series of slots top and bottom, and the one you move it into is dependant on which way the red hand is pointing - whether it's up or down.
This one took us forever.
Now, we would maybe have been prepared to overlook that one little puzzle - if it had been the only one. Maybe, we thought, it was just us - perhaps we'd misunderstood what the person said. So we carried on, with relatively few hitches - until we came to the combination padlock puzzle. Now, this one wasn't phenomenally difficult to get your head round (unlike the card puzzle) - you just needed to find the right combination of numbers to unlock the padlock, which someone had handily written down for us. The problem with this was in the execution, with how you were supposed to enter the combination. You needed to turn the dial to the correct number by rotating the Wii Remote - and you need to change direction after entering every number. To make matters worse, the lock doesn't rotate as you rotate the Wii Remote - it either speeds up or slows down depending on how much you're tilting it. It wouldn't be so bad if the marks on the dial weren't so small either, but as it stands, you'll find you tend to go a few marks past where you need to be, so instinctively go to turn back, only to have Margaret go "Oh no! That's not right. I'll need to start again.". After about twenty minutes of trying, throwing the Wii Remote down in a strop, and seriously thinking of throwing Margaret overboard just so I didn't have to hear her go "Oh no!" for the millionth time, I managed to eventually do it. Thank god.
Luckily, the developers seem to have realised how unfriendly those two puzzles are, as they've included the option to skip over them, using one of the game's two rather useful features. If you're wandering round aimlessly without a clue what to do, you can get a hint that'll show you where to go, and if you find a particular puzzle section too hard (or two awkward) you can skip it - although, by doing this you will miss out large sections of the game.
The hint feature comes in rather useful, seeing as Titanic, like many other point and click games often suffers from slightly awkward sections where you don't really know what to do, because either you haven't picked something up (because you haven't noticed it), or the game's expecting you to do something different to what you think you should do. The hint icon (the little magnifying glass in the top right corner) will draw a glowing circle around the bit you've missed - or if you need to use a specific object with something, it will circle where it needs to go as well as putting a little outline of the object inside it. Ingenious. It isn't a perfect system, by any means, but it mostly does its job - only getting tripped up when areas have 'sub areas' built into them, such as when you're examining a jewlery box, in a room, and the hints system has a tendency to get confused. Sometimes, if you need to do something in a 'sub area', it will highlight the object you need to click on to enter said 'sub area' - and other times Margaret will just say "There's nothing left for me to do here.", only for you to click into the 'sub area' and use a hint, to find the thing circled.
Seagulls. Apparently they looked a lot like pigeons in 1912. Either that, or Margaret fails at bird identification.
One oversight seems to be that the hints are not available for the puzzles - we might have been able to work out the cards and clock puzzle, if we'd have been able to have a hint or two as to what we had to do. Instead, we could either skip it altogether, or just sit there scratching our heads ad infinitum. What would be really good would be if we could have had a series of three hints, each one more detailed than the last - in a similar way to on Professor Layton - so that we could have as many as we needed.
Most of the characters are fine - some are even quite entertaining - the constant bickering between a woman called Odette and the not-very-good Indian psychic can be rather funny. And even though the accents are rather dodgy - listening to a (presumably) American attempt at a cockney accent is certainly an experience - you don't tend to notice too much. However, there is one character that you end up wanting to drown prematurely - Margaret's husband, Robert, who is the most insufferable, inconsiderate, impatient twerp on the entire ship. I honestly don't know what Margaret sees in him. He's constantly belittling her - telling her he doesn't think the captain will approve of how she speaks, and that he doesn't want the trip spoilt by her 'delicate nature'. And he insists on separate cabins for the two of them, despite - as Margaret frequently points out - the fact they're married. Oh, and then he won't go to see the ship's doctor when he's suffering from rather bad seasickness because it would appear 'weak'. You just want to slap him sometimes.
All in all, Hidden Mysteries: Titanic is a decent point and click adventure game, with an interesting setting in that most mysterious of ships. There's plenty for people with a keen interest in the Titanic too - from the re-created environments to little nods towards alternative theories as to why it sank - there's a Mummy in a hold downstairs that, according to some of the alternative theories, may have cursed the ship, which caused it sink. Though it's certainly not without problems (though nor was the Titanic) it's mostly confined to a handful of awkward puzzles, and a few blips with the hint system. Oh, and Robert.
Format Reviewed: Nintendo Wii
