Miss Teri Tale: Episode I - Where's Jason

The Good
This is a story about an author who moves to a new town and gets involved in looking for a missing dog. In order to investigate she has to search locations in her neighbours' houses multiple times. These searches reveal clues which flesh out the story eliminating suspects until only one is left.
It's a neat concept for a game that lends itself to limited locations, no violence or scary scenes to frighten children and those of a sensitive disposition, and enough puzzling to make a decent game.

The sound is OK, the artwork is OK, the game mechanics are flawless and the game autosaves which, though it's a fairly standard feature, is still good to have.

In this game the player is limited to five hints, represented by clover leaves, at any one time. The good thing though is that when these have all been used up the player can leave a scene, return to their base location and search for two more clovers. They then return to the scene that they were working on and resume at which they left.

Throughout the game the player is spurred on by messages from a mysterious figure and the story is further expanded by regular updates from the local newspaper. While these are not relevant to the game itself they add a sense of pace, they make an interesting diversion and give the game the sense that someone cared enough to try and make it fun to play

Another nice touch is that, when the game is completed an epilogue scene is made available. This scene has no restrictions on either time or hints, I've played it through once and on the second playing I was asked to find a different set of items. It does not extend gameplay enormously but it's another 'nice to have'

There were some odd items to look for too, when you're asked to find Africa, for example, where do you look?

The Bad
I have two main problems with this game. The first is the artwork and the second is to do with the game mechanics.

The artwork is good but not wonderful. I can forgive changing the colour of a flamingo to green and hiding among the bushes, that's sort of expected in a game of this kind. My main problem with the artwork is that the pictures weren't clear enough, I could not identify some items simply because I could not distinguish them from their surroundings even when I'd used the help function to find out where they were.
Another, smaller, problem is that the game uses American names for everything and I had no idea what, for example, a 'plain tree leaf' looked like or what a 'gas rattle' was.

My other problem with the game is the way the items are presented. As is expected in games of this type the player is given a list of items to find however this game presents them three or four at a time. Therefore when one item has been located another takes it's place. It's a minor point but I prefer to search the screen for a lot of items at a time rather than look for three and then have to re-search the screen from scratch when a new item is added to the list.

The Bottom Line
Another hidden object game, there's a lot of this kind of game out there and while this is not the best it's not the worst either. It's a nice tale that has been designed so that it won't offend anyone yet still manages to avoid being completely bland.

I completed it in around seven hours and I used the hint system more than I really care to admit partly because the artwork wasn't crisp, partly because there were American terms I didn't understand, and partly because some things were really hard to find.