John Walker's Electronic House

A double-review of some casual gaming distractions appears on EG today.

PopCap has previously done a couple of Mystery P.I. games on PC, The Lottery Ticket and The Vegas Heist, and Portrait of a Thief borrows very heavily from the former. Indeed, many of the same screens are used, this time to “tell the story” of an art theft that you’re “investigating”.

Such laborious use of quotation marks is pretty necessary here, since all you ever do throughout is hunt busy images for items on the list, then solve a simple puzzle, and repeat, forever. Which is not necessarily a bad thing. Against all reason, this most simplistic and ridiculous of notions is oddly gratifying. Think Where’s Wally, but with dozens of things to find and none of them wearing stupid hats. It’s that constant hammering on the satisfaction button as you tap on the third frog, and then spot the umbrella along the top bar of the lamppost. Ding! Each object vanishes from the scene and is crossed out on your list.

Read on.