The next in a long line of simple, family-themed mysteries is Mortimer Beckett and the Secrets of Spooky Manor.

The story is simple: A brief comic strip explains that you are Mortimer Beckett, a young man who receives an urgent letter to head to his uncle’s ghost-ridden mansion. Your uncle is imprisoned inside, and you must find all the pieces of his ghost machine, scattered throughout the house, to save him.

Playing like an old-school computer game, you’re presented a one-dimensional mansion that you may investigate in groups. Each group has a few rooms, and each room has a handful of broken artifacts hidden inside that you must find. When you find all of the pieces, the objects must be placed in their original location, or given to a ghost to move forward. When each group of rooms is completed, you move to the next, until you find all of the pieces to the ghost machine, save your uncle, and run the machine.

Playing the game is simple – you point the Wii remote at the picture, and when you find a piece, you click, sending it into your collection. However, this isn’t Where’s Waldo? simple. The pieces aren’t hidden in such a way that you see a full piece. You might see just a corner of a piece behind something else, camouflaged in something that is almost the same color, or sometimes hidden behind something you have to deal with first (with a key, a knife etc).

On the bright side, Story mode can be played by more than one person, and four, six, or eight eyes is better than two. Groups can also look through rooms for items in Scavenger mode, where the person who finds the most objects wins, or Ghost World, where the person who finds all the pieces of their object first, wins. However, they’re just the same rooms and artifacts you’ve found in Story mode, so there’s not much differentiation.

You can get this game for your computer, and really, it might as well stay there. It’s just like old-school computer games, and it only requires the Wii console because you point at objects and shake your Wii remote when certain ghosts pop up. This, merged with one dimensional graphics and basic gameplay, makes it a very simple game that will get used up quickly and then gather dust or hit the used shelves. It’s just not the sort of game you can continue playing, unless you like memorizing the game and just zipping through the levels by memory.

Rent it for the kids for a night or weekend of fun, but don’t bother buying it.

--- C