Paranormal Crime Investigations: Brotherhood of the Crescent Snake Collector's Edition

Paranormal Crime Investigations - The Brotherhood of the Snake is a hidden-object adventure from GI Games where you embody a detective expert in the paranormal field. As the best detective in the department, you are called up to investigate a series of murders in the city of New Orleans. It's Mardi Gras and you arrive to the crime scene to find a body on the street with weird marks on the arm and symbols probably related to some sort of ritual. Equipped with your PCI Kit, you start piecing this story together by collecting objects and exploring a mysterious neighborhood.

The game plays mostly as a standard point-and-click adventure with hidden-object scenes and puzzles. You will be exploring the game areas with your mouse and scouring the environment to find interactive areas - often marked by cursor changes - and useful objects. The PCI Kit will play an important role along the game, it will keep track of the story development but also will allow you to analyze suspicious substances through a series of mini games. Objects can be picked up in any area of the game while you walk and also in HOG scenes, and those which can be useful for the investigation will be stored in your inventory.

HOG scenes, on the other hand, are marked by sparkles and are pretty standard; you will see the usual list of items with one special object that needs an additional step to spot it. These hidden-object scenes are quite challenging; elements are cleverly concealed with the rest of the scene and you may need to resort to the hints to find them.

As far as graphics go, Paranormal Crime Investigations does a great job, with very detailed environments and excellent rendition of the black magic imagery. Music also helps in creating the right atmosphere to accompany the storyline. The only thing I didn't like about the game is how the story is resolved; it starts as an engaging tale of suspense, and involving supernatural elements, there was a lot to expect. Instead, it ends up with a predictable and somewhat disappointing plot twist. If you don't mind that, though, The Brotherhood of the snake is a game that you can have a lot of fun with.