by Glen Delahaye

Created on: July 30, 2008   Last Updated: March 31, 2011

4/5

Forgotten Riddles: The Moonlight Sonatas is such a basic game that it could probably have been released as an interactive story book or alongside the Sudoku, and crosswords in a newspaper. Despite that, it's rather fun and addictive.

The game begins with a short back story; you are going to be investigating the former home of a talented composer that is supposedly haunted. At night, neighbors think they can hear music being played in the deserted house and your job is to work out where this is coming from. But none of this actually matters at all and as soon as you start playing the game you'll have forgotten all about the deceased composer.

For most of the game you'll be placed in a different rooms filled with objects which correspond to a number of riddles that are given. For example: "When I'm held in the hand of a fellow well aged, he may find his trouble with walking assuaged". The answer to the riddle is a walking stick, so you click on the walking stick in the room and so on with the rest of the riddles. Once you've solved them all, you move on to the next room and do the same again. Apparently the previous Forgotten Riddles installment, The Mayan Princess, had 1'500 riddles to solve. I couldn't begin to guess the amount that Moonlight Sonatas has, but it is a lot.

That's pretty much how the entire game works, except with slight variations in some rooms. Occasionally you'll find yourself in a room where you interact with the room to unlock doors and hidden secrets. It's like those bookcases in movies, where you pull out the right book and the book case opens up like a door. This is a little more complicated though. You have to look for clues in the room which provide answers to some of the usable objects, such as finding a combination of letters that can be entered into a machine that opens a hole in the wall and so on.

The game itself is that simple. It's been programmed in such a way that you can cheat just by randomly clicking around the room until you find the wrong object. As long as you don't click more than a few times per second, the game won't pickup on you doing this at all. The graphics aren't any more sophisticated, as the game is mostly just still images. Yet they are mostly rather beautiful images and together with the eerie piano music they give the game an appropriate haunted feel.

It's not easy to make a game sound appealing when all you can say is that it has lots of riddles in it, but that really is all there is to it and I can't put it any other way. Actually, if somebody tried to sell a game to me that way, I would never try it. But let me assure you, that even though it doesn't sound exciting, it is fun. Take my word for it.

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