So at last I'm back to Carol Reed. These games are wonderful diversions for those of us who'd enjoy visiting Sweden without any language barriers, seeing some gorgeous scenery, and solving some moderately challenging puzzles. Plus, there's always an intriguing storyline.
Along with the gorgeous scenery we also get plenty of derelict buildings and industrial areas, as well as messy apartments to explore. I always enjoy the apartments.
This time Carol investigates the murder of a man who was tied to the Olaf Palme murder (Palme was the Prime Minister of Sweden who was shot in the street in 1986. The crime was never solved.) An anonymous man contacts her for help, but he stays hidden. Next thing Carol knows, the police contact her because she's the last person he phoned, and now he's been strangled.
As she pokes around, breaking into apartments, she (or rather, we) open coded boxes and discover clues that lead us closer to the man, dead for several years, who had been accused of the Palme murder. Seems this man was a lifelong friend of our murdered guy, Harri.
So far I've poked around in an old air raid bunker where there is a green cabinet I need to find a key for--there's a locked desk in Harri's apartment that I need to find a key for--and there's what appears to be some kind of colored tile puzzle in a very interesting, deserted area.
Also, to get to one of the new places on the map, Carol had to borrow Jonas's car. It wouldn't start, so we had to find the items necessary to clean the spark plugs. That, as always, involves going back to another area.
There are some innovations in this game. For the first time, if you hit the space bar you can see hot spots. That's quite useful not only for finding stuff, but also for not wasting time on a scene that has no items or actions. Also, for the first time, there is a map within the larger map. We navigate to different areas in these games by going to the area map. When we learn about new addresses, these are added to the map, making it a nice dynamic in the game. This time there was a large area that had it's own map. No doubt I'll be back there, because Carol refused to enter the Hospital area of the place.
As always, we talk to people by clicking on dialogue written for us on notepads, like this:
The characters answer us in voiceovers, with subtitles (I always have these on but you can turn them off if you wish). And as always, the actors are amateurs, which I think lends a really nice atmosphere to these games. These folks aren't professionals, but they are sincere and really authentic. I like them.
Here's Jonas responding to a statement from Carol:
I figure I'm about halfway through the game, judging by the length of time it usually takes me to finish. Yeah, I could probably stay up and do the whole thing tonight, but I'll leave the rest to have some fun tomorrow.
Now that I have my Fusion virtual machine back, and XP is nicely updated, I've got all my games back! I bought this one just last week, and number 10 came out yesterday. I got that too! Not too difficult to get them into the virtual machine. I just click the link in the email that takes you to the download page, copy it, open the virtual XP machine, open Google Chrome and paste the link into the address bar. Voila! It starts downloading immediately. Takes awhile, but it's all there. I also wound up with a copy on the Mac side, but of course that won't open. Didn't want to get that but it's an automatic download.
So, I've put Carol to bed until tomorrow!
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