Dark Tales: Edgar Allan Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue

In 19th century France, detective Auguste Dupin is summoned to Paris, called to investigate the brutal murder of Madame L'Espanaye and the kidnapping of her sister Camille. Along with his assistant, he must search for evidence and use his sharp mind and its powers of deduction to elucidate the case and find the culprit.

Dark Tales: Edgar Allan Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue is a hidden object game based on Poe's influential short story published in 1841. The overall design follows the recent trend of combining seek-and-find gameplay with adventure elements. Like in the later entries of the Mystery Case Files series, the adventure and hidden object sections are clearly defined, with shimmering hotspots on the scenery indicating the presence of a separate hidden object screen on the location.

The navigation and inventory usage follow the standards of the point-and-click adventure genre, where the player moves between the rooms by clicking on exit hotspots positioned over logical places, like doors and other openings, and use the collected items directly on the scenery. The inventory items are found scattered through the scenery, received after completing one of the hidden object screens or acquired after solving one of the puzzles. They are stored on slots at the bottom of the screen, from where they can be dragged and dropped on appropriate portions of the scene to perform an action or complete a task.

Some puzzles take place on separate screens, where pieces or mechanisms have to be manipulated directly to solve them. A few are implementations of old concepts, like a jigsaw puzzle with pieces of a Paris map, a tile-sliding puzzle as the lock for a safe, and other similar challenges. Other puzzles require some sort of combination or code. The necessary clues can be found on the locations and are automatically entered on the assistant's notebook, accessible at any time from the bottom-right interface. The hint button highlights the position of one of the required objects, but takes some time to recharge after use.