I have always been a lover of point & click adventures such as Broken Sword, Myst and obviously Leisure Suit Larry, but haven’t played one for a long time, so when I was asked to Review “The Lost Crown”, a touch of nostalgia took over me.

As reviews go this was quite hard as I don’t want to go into to much of the storyline as this will give away spoilers. So on that note the story involves a main character called Nigel Danvers who has arrived in the quaint and sleepy harbour village of Saxton, to find hidden treasures and to uncover some of Saxtons many secrets.

The graphics are very good and are all very photogenic in black & white, except for using the slightest bit of colour, for instance you could be in the woods and the image is predominantly black & white but the daisies and bluebells will all be in colour, it doesn’t sound too exciting but it really works well, also although the images are static you will always see some kind of movement such as birds flying around or squirrels in trees etc, this is a very nice touch and again works very well. But there are some downsides the characters animation really let the game down, for instance when walking the characters look like they are moonwalking across the screen, this could be enough to put people off and that would a real shame as the rest of the graphics are so solid. 

The sound is good, you will here seagulls on the beach and harbour, frogs in the fenlands, bells ringing and much more but again it is the characters that let the game down, there is a lot of speech to get through and they all sound as though they are really bored, there is no personality coming through at all.

Thankfully the gameplay side of things is very good with some great puzzles that increasingly get harder as the game progresses, once you are given your ghost hunting equipment the game really takes on a new life as you will begin to examine certain objects that you would not have bothered to look at before, and once you do look at them through the camera you may be surprised what you will find.

The Lost Crown is a huge game and you will not get through it over a couple of days, the characters do walk (moonwalk) very slowly to various places and unfortunately there is no way of jumping straight to another location, you can double-click on the page which does speed things up slightly, however not by much.

While The Lost Crown isn’t perfect, thanks to the flaws mentioned previously, if you like your point and click adventures then it could be a worth addition to your collection.