Review: Cate West – The Vanishing Files (Wii)

What do you get if you cross Allison DuBois with Jessica Fletcher, would you be surprised to hear it's Cate West? For those of you that may have been living under a rock for the last twenty five years Allison DuBois is the real life psychic detective who was dramatised in the TV show Medium, whilst Jessica Fletcher is the mystery writer who kept sticking her nose in in 'Murder She Wrote'. So, that makes Cate West a mystery writer who just happens to be psychic too, a strange combination.

Crime Spree

So, when a crime spree breaks out in Arcadia City Cate feels duty bound to offer her services to the cities police department, and with the crimes centring around the site of her fathers death seventeen years ago she also has personal interests. The crimes start off quite trivial, vandalism, petty theft, that sort of thing, but they do escalate to armed robbery, and even more serious cases as you progress through the game. But regardless of the seriousness of the crime they are all investigated in the same manner, first off you start by searching for clues, this is done by visiting a number of crime scenes, represented by still pictures, and finding the objects listed beside the photo.

You are given a very generous time limit in which to do this, and with a flick of the Wiimotes 'B' trigger you can toggle on a magnifying glass to make things easier for you. If you are still having trouble finding everything though you can use the hint function, which will highlight an area of the screen so as you know where to look. Doing this will incur a penalty though at the end of the round, as does making too many wrong guesses in a row, but you never feel pressured by the time limit, and it's all very straightforward, despite the overly cluttered crime scenes you have to search.

Use your Head

Once you have gathered enough clues you then start to use your psychic powers, from the clues you will determine what evidence you need, then it's back to the crime scenes to find it. You'll find gathering the evidence a bit easier than finding the clues as you know what they look like, but each piece of evidence is split in to parts. Even so though you'll have your evidence in no time, and from that evidence your psychic powers will tell you where the criminals hideout is, or at least give you a vision of it. To confirm the location of the hideout you'll be playing a game of spot the difference, again this isn't too hard, and if your observational skills just aren't up to it there's the ever present hint option.

Armed with evidence and hideout location you have enough information to narrow down the list of suspects. You'll have eight to choose from for each crime, and Cates psychic powers should reveal enough from the evidence to eliminate the majority of them, then it's just a matter of guessing the most likely from who is left. Now you have your suspect all that is left to take them to court, here you'll be needed to recreate the crime scene, which is like the spot the difference, except you have to place objects where they belong till the two pictures match, again nothing too demanding.

Strong Story

As you can see, all the steps to solving the crime are very similar, and you'll find the same locations cropping up to investigate on more than one occasion, so you'd expect the game to get repetitive quickly. And it does a bit, but with every crime solved the mystery unravels, and the story is pretty good, so you don't notice it so much. I won't spoil it for you, but it's got all the elements you'd expect in a good mystery story, and it does keep you hooked right through to the end.

Speaking of endings, the game has three different ones, depending on how much you score, so that adds to the replay value, as do some fun multiplayer modes. You have the option of playing against a friend to see who can collect the most clues, but co-operative mode is much better, where you can play through the story with a friend. Seeing as the story is the best part of the game, this is preferable to the competitive mode, and with the multiple endings there is incentive to do it even if you've completed the game on your own.

Mystery Solved

As hidden object games go the Wii isn't exactly lacking, but you could do a lot worse than picking up Cate West. The gameplay itself is pretty average for the genre, and the graphics do make it a bit difficult to spot some of the objects you are looking for, but it's plus points more than compensate. The games storyline holds the average gameplay together well, the overall presentation is pretty good, and to top it all off is the games budget price.