If you thought you’d heard the last of Mortimer Beckett after he managed to evict the ghosts from his uncle’s house in Mortimer Beckett and the Secrets of Spooky Manor, think again! RealArcade and Paprikari granted us a first look at the upcoming sequel, Mortimer Beckett and the Time Paradox, where we learn that the pesky ghosts are still causing trouble.
Apparently the ghosts were able to enter the manor through an open time portal, which is not good news. In fact, it has caused random objects to start passing through and ending up in random locations throughout history, which has created dangerous time paradoxes. It’s up to Mortimer, with the help of eccentric Uncle Jerome, to put things right.
If you thought you’d heard the last of Mortimer Beckett after he managed to evict the ghosts from his uncle’s house in Mortimer Beckett and the Secrets of Spooky Manor, think again! RealArcade and Paprikari granted us a first look at the upcoming sequel, Mortimer Beckett and the Time Paradox, where we learn that the pesky ghosts are still causing trouble.
Apparently the ghosts were able to enter the manor through an open time portal, which is not good news. In fact, it has caused random objects to start passing through and ending up in random locations throughout history, which has created dangerous time paradoxes. It’s up to Mortimer, with the help of eccentric Uncle Jerome, to put things right.
Like the first Mortimer Beckett game, items in Time Paradox are split into individual pieces that you have to find in order to fit the objects back together. Once the item is whole again, it’s added to your inventory and you can use it to solve a puzzle somewhere else in the scene by placing it onto the appropriate hotspot. (Such as finding three pieces of a barrel lid and placing it back onto the barrel.)
In all, there are eight different stages of history to explore. The first one we found ourselves in was the Viking Age in the year 901 A.D. Each Age consists of a map with several locations to travel between. In the Viking Age, for example, we explored a village, a tavern full of rowdy horn-helmeted guests, an ancient temple devoted to the Norse gods, and finally a cave whose entrance was being guarded by a formidable looking Frost Giant.
Mortimer has two tasks he must complete in each era. First, he must find the pieces of Uncle Jerome’s Time Bomb, which is the key to sealing the portals for good. He also has to find the pieces to all the objects, fix them, and return them to their appropriate places.
In Time Paradox, not all of the misplaced items are found in the same room. Instead, you’ll have to travel to several different locations to find out where to use the items in your inventory. Some locations allow you to travel deeper inside, like entering a cave from the outside or walking to the docks from the main part of the village. As well, some object fragments aren’t revealed unless you solve a puzzle or mini-game first.
Mortimer is able to write down clues needed to solve the puzzles in a journal that can be accessed at any time. For example, one of the puzzles in the Viking Age involved dialling a phone number on the payphone inside the tavern (yes, a payphone in 901 A.D. – this is why time paradoxes are bad!) Inside the journal was written a puzzle consisting of simple arithmetic equations that, when solved, revealed the correct phone number to dial.
Another interesting new feature is the fact that there are more characters to interact with, like the goddess Freya, who asked Mortimer to return her sword and shield to her in exchange for revealing one of the object pieces he was looking for.
We didn’t manage to get all the way through Time Paradox during our hands-on time with it, but one thing we did notice is that when you start a new game, the item pieces will be in different places so the game offers some replay value.
Needless to say, we were pretty excited about what we saw so far in Mortimer Beckett and the Time Paradox. We’ll be waiting impatiently to get our hands on the final version. In the meantime, let us know your thoughts in our forum by clicking here.
