PixlBit

James Patterson sure knows how to write an interesting story. Right off the bat, the player is thrust onto a crime scene involving a young Asian woman washed up on the shores of San Francisco. James, you have my full attention.

Played through the perspective of Detective Lindsay Boxer, the game follows the deaths of seemingly unrelated people. The player becomes a detective, receiving assignments from police headquarters for what to investigate the scene for. Holding the DS on its side like a book, the player investigates the scene of the crime depicted on the touch screen for assignments given on the opposite screen. The crime scene is generally 4.5 times larger than the screen itself, so you have to use the stylus to slide the image, which is actually not as annoying as you'd think. I found it made the assignments more challenging to complete, and surprisingly not annoying. Tasks include examining the dead body, finding clues and murder weapons that prove that the crime was truly a crime, and cleaning up the scene of the crime by finding objects or silhouettes of random shapes, such as a spade or a ballerina.

Occasionally there are mini-games used to solve mysteries. For example, a note is left under a mahjong game and the puzzle must be solved in order to read it. When Dr. Claire Washburn, your friend in forensics, runs tests on evidence, you have to complete a puzzle game where you must remove all of the spores in 30 moves or less by morphing them together. These really do add to the game since they are fun divergences, but they are far too sparse to really have a major effect on the game.

The plot spans a plethora of topics and people. Broken down into chapters, each one focuses on a newly found dead body. To be honest, when I think back to certain homicides I don't even know how they, or the original suspects, fit into the whole case. And for the first three chapters I thought that they were all entirely separate stories. The variety and number of characters and their development is fantastic, though. I might not be able to tell you how everyone really fit together, but I can tell you a lot about them. I was actually expecting the story to delve into Detective Boxer's depression over her lack of a love life, although it never went that far.

Every chapter is summed up over a dinner with the ladies of the titular murder club, although they aren't so sadistic that they acknowledge themselves as that. During discussions between Lindsay, Dr. Washburn, and friends, the player must answer the questions about the cases posed to her by her friends. This is done by selecting the image of the answer. While the majority of these are obvious, there were some questions that I answered confidently but were met with a loud noise and I'm sorry I don't know what you mean, detective. There's no penalty for answering questions wrong, but it's tedious and occasionally frustrating.

The graphics are comprised of well-drawn stills of characters and scenarios. The closest to animation the game gets is by placing a series of stills together to simulate movement. In the scene where a man falls, it takes him about four stills to fall, with each displaying for enough time to allow the player to appreciate them as stills rather than animation.

I found the touch screen-only controls to work well. I originally hated the touch screen map section for a while, because I was tapping the point where the location was, not the image of the location that floated nearby.

There's an added feature for the DSi called Photo Mysteries, which allows players to take pictures to create characters in their own murder mystery. The game prompts you to photograph a man, a dog, etc. These are all put together in the end to create a story that can be shared with family and friends an infinite number of times until you turn the game off. It's a fun distraction, but not really anything to come back to often as there are only 8 different scenarios.

While I had fun playing Women's Murder Club: Games of Passion, the fun was short-lived; the game only took me two and a half hours to complete. I thought that it was a great idea to hold the DS sideways like a book, since the game is based off of a book series. I really liked investigating the crimes, but I can't get over how I don't know how they all fit together. To be honest, I'm really looking forward to more James Patterson games, because it was an interesting romp around the seedy underworld of San Francisco.