After solving the murder case in the first Special Enquiry Detail on Android, and surpassing some “laptop hates me” moments of technical difficulties, I finally finished playing through the second adventure starring detectives Lamonte and Turino.
Once again, the pair joins forces to solve the mysterious disappearance of a recently engaged model. As you examine the scene and gather clues, you discover that this is just one more in a series of gruesome deaths. All the victims have a few things in common: they are all blondes, they appear dead dressed in wedding gowns, and always shortly after officially announcing their engagement.
The gameplay is once again split between story, hidden object scenes and some puzzle solving. This time around, I felt like the hidden object scenes were taking me a lot longer to complete than in the original game. Objects seem to blend in a lot more with each other or with the backgrounds, some of them make use of ambiguous words to add a bit of extra confusion, and some scenes are just so crowded that it seems impossible to find no matter what it is that is on the list. One particular scene gave me the hardest time: a dresser with four different drawers, which obviously we couldn’t see the contents of all at once. I was opening and closing drawers for what seemed like hours, and I abused the hint system, which is now represented by a flashlight instead of the former police badge. Clicking everywhere in hopes of finding the listed items isn’t an option, as this will freeze your cursor, forcing you to “slow down”.
You re-visit the scenes, which can be helpful since you may remember where something was from before, but it is unfortunate that there aren’t as many scenes to see as in the first game.
As far as the puzzles go, I also had more trouble solving these than the ones in The Hand That Feeds. While some are pretty accessible in terms of solving, many of them play on your logical and observational abilities. For example, you will be comparing hair samples on a forensic lab by using a series of contrast modifiers, but aside from knowing that you need to find a match, there is no instruction on HOW the match is found. You can skip the puzzles once the timer runs down, but even then there will be no explanation regarding the completion of this process.
Other more light-hearted puzzles include finding pieces in a given hidden object scene and placing them in the appropriate spots or use them to put something together, combining things in your inventory, doing some image editing to fake an announcement or placing all evidence in the right order on a board.
The story is good, and I felt like a fool when I discovered the murderer… I was wrong all along! Nothing like a good plot twist, gruesome murder scenes and some occasional funny ramblings from the two main characters. The voice acting though, leaves a lot to be desired.
I was expecting to find a “bonus game” at the end, but there was nothing else. It would have been nice if the same Free Play feature appeared after solving the case, so we could go back and find all the objects in all the scenes, or play all the puzzles again.
Overall, Engaged to Kill isn’t a bad game, but it wasn’t as compelling as The Hand That Feeds. It could have used more of the forensic work, some instructions as far as some of the puzzles go, and definitely the Free Play mode that made the original title worth replaying. The story is great and maybe it’s not for everyone, since the photo-realistic victims may impress some people, but that is one of the details I especially liked. I’d say if this is your type of game, play Engaged to Kill first and then check out The Hand That Feeds, since they are completely unrelated stories and not exactly a “sequel”. You will get more enjoyment out of both in that order.
Special thanks to Vera Mayuk and G5 Entertainment for providing a copy of this title.