Casual Review

Full Review

The world of the Blood Ties television series provides a great premise for detective-themed games. Take supernatural mysteries, throw in a heroic vampire, pepper with the occasional ghost or demon, and you’ve got the world of Vicki Nelson and her friends. But this game isn’t about them – it’s about you doing the real detective work yourself, gathering hidden clues like in any other hidden object game.

The good news is there are no new tricks or skills to learn – like with any other hidden object game, you visit different locations and sift through the messy piles of junk lying around, finding the clues on your list. In fact, it’s a pretty easy game as far as they go – all the objects are clearly visible for you to click on, hidden in plain sight, with none of the “faded into the background” items that make life difficult in some of the harder object search games.

Blood Ties is well suited for novice players, since it really doesn’t take long to find all the objects on each clue list. There are also mystical symbols hidden in each scene that you can click on to earn you hints that you can use to discover the last nagging items on each list. Still it’s not so easy that you totally forget that you have a ticking time limit on each level. All in all, the designers have found a pretty forgiving balance of difficulty and pace. I have a feeling that the more demanding expert players might find it a cakewalk.

I wouldn’t say this game “makes you feel you are there in the TV show” since Vicki and Henry and the other characters from Blood Ties barely show up, but to be fair there’s lots of ambient night sounds in the shadowy crime scenes, and the art is competent enough, that it’ll help to immerse you into the world of mystical mystery for at least a few fun hours, clicking away at those clues.

Review by Poh Tun Kai