Mortimer Beckett and the Lost King

After barely completing his last time-traveling adventure, Mortimer Beckett thought he was finally on his way home. Instead, he wakes up in a strange fantasy landscape, where incredible beings and impossible contraptions are commonplace. He learns from the stone golem Grongh that the kingdom was once prosperous and ruled by a beloved king. The monarch suddenly disappeared one day, leaving behind his powerful magical crown. The throne was quickly usurped by one of the king's advisors, a Machiavellian man called Cedric Syper. The king's trusted secretary hid the magical artifact in an attempt to thwart Cedric's plans, scattering the encrusted jewels throughout the land. Mortimer must search the kingdom for the missing gems to find the king and the way out of this world.

Mortimer Beckett and the Lost King is the third entry in a series of hidden object and adventure hybrid games by Paprikari. This installment further approximates the two genres, ditching the search for pieces of objects from the earlier titles, and adding fully animated cutscenes between the chapters. Each chapter takes place on a fiefdom, town or city with the standard quasi-medieval characteristics of the fantasy genre. The player moves between locations with the provided map, visiting several places to collect all the necessary objects and solve puzzles. The ultimate goal of each chapter is to fix or build a way out of the place, usually through some means of transportation after collecting all the pieces of one of the crown jewels.

The inventory is always visible at the bottom of the screen, showing pictures of all the objects that must be found and clicked on the scenery. After being stored, they can be dragged and dropped from the inventory to an appropriate and logical portion of the scene to perform an action or complete a task. Most items give a jewel piece after being placed on the correct spot. The cursor is context-sensitive, changing into revolving gears when positioned over a place that needs one of the inventory items, morphing into a speech balloon when placed over a character with some information, becoming a magnifying glass when hovering over a scenery feature with another zoom angle, transforming into a jigsaw puzzle piece when close to a mini-game, and showing an arrow when near one of the exit hotspots.

Mini-games appear on a separate screen, where the player has to complete jigsaw puzzles with pieces of stained glass and shredded paper, find pairs of symbols and cards on memory games, click on the differences between several mirror images of Mortimer, or otherwise manipulate some sort of mechanism to complete them. The hint button highlights the position of one of the required objects, but takes some time to recharge after use.