Try our new online interactive murder mystery game!
Mystery at Mansfield Manor
We've partnered with the Canadian producers of this exciting new online interactive murder mystery game to bring it to you in a special deal.
It's a dark and stormy night, as oil baron Colin Mansfield Sr hosts a gathering of his family and friends. The power fails, and when light returns, Mansfield is found lying dead -- poisoned. Could it possibly be related to the fact that he'd just made an announcement about his will?
In Mystery at Mansfield Manor, you're a police detective investigating a murder. You visit the scene of the crime, and interview the ten suspects -- family, staff and friends of the dead man. You have to compare their stories, spot the conflicting details, and work out who's telling the truth and who's trying to conceal their guilt. Like in our own games, there are several overlapping secrets, lies and plotlines. You'll have to unpick them and make your accusation, before time runs out!
So how does it actually work?
The game is written as a Flash application, and mostly works with pre-filmed footage. So your investigation of the mansion, and your interviews with the suspects, are all filmed, and you can move back and forth through them, playing them as you wish to extract all the relevant details. You have a notebook facility to keep track of potential inconsistencies and lies.
You can move at any point to the interactive deduction area where you accumulate and filter your suspicions and deductions, by dragging and annotating the various clues onto a grid of the suspects. If you get that right, you can interview them again to pin them down further. Finally you get to make your accusation: if you manage to deduce the identity of the killer, well done! -- if not, you're hauled off the case in ignominy.
How long does the game take to play?
Mystery at Mansfield Manor will take a few hours of play, exactly how long depending on what your deductive skills are like. When you sign up to play, you buy a membership that lasts 96 hours (4 days), so you can break up your playing time however you like over that period. The game will remember you when you come back to it.
Is it any good though?
To be honest, we were a bit unsure ourselves about the project when we first heard about it. When the producers approached us for this partnership, we wanted to play through the game ourselves first, because we weren't going to offer it to our customers unless it was as good as our own games are. But we were very favourably impressed -- we think Mystery at Mansfield Manor is great fun, and that it offers good playing value at the price. The actors playing the suspects are professionals, the script is smooth and the location is beautifully atmospheric. Most importantly, the mystery is ingeniously designed and should prove a real puzzle for you!
You can sign up to play Mystery at Mansfield Manor here below. It costs just 4.20 GB pounds, about 6.37 US dollars at the current rate. That gives you 96 hours to solve the mystery!
IMPORTANT: after making your payment, you'll see a page headed "Thank you for your payment", with a button saying "Click here to start your game ". You MUST click that button to come back to our site, otherwise your purchase of the game won't register properly.
Here's a trailer for Mystery at Mansfield Manor -- to give you a hint of the flavour of the game.