Combining one-part ghost story, one-part historical intrigue, and one-part literary backdrop, Midnight Mysteries: Salem Witch Trials whisks you back in time to unravel the mystery of the murder of Nathaniel Hawthorne, famed American author of such classics as The House Of The Seven Gables and The Scarlet Letter. Sin, guilt, and atonement, which are familiar characters in Hawthorne’s stories, take up residence in this casual adventure as you determine whether Hawthorne’s spirit can escape the sins of his ancestors. As you gather clues to his murder, you’ll encounter no shortage of sinners and sinfulness, including domineering Puritans, blood curses, stolen land, ghosts, and of course witch hunts in this spooky game. While you may find yourself a bit lost in a maze of characters and stories, the terrific atmosphere, logical inventory puzzles, plenty of fun animations, and well-integrated hidden object episodes round out this lite but entertaining game.

In the Midnight Mysteries series, you play a writer who has a connection to the spirit world. But not just any old spirits – your character is a magnet for the ghosts of classic novelists. These ghosts ask you to use your powers of observation to explore the scenes not only of their deaths, but also of their most famous stories to find clues to their murders. Salem Witch Trials takes this formula, which began as a pretty straightforward hidden object game in The Edgar Allan Poe Conspiracy, and turns it up several notches by increasing your interaction with your environment, expanding the scope of exploration, and giving you plenty of inventory puzzles to solve for a better, more balanced adventure-like experience.

While loosely based on real-life relationships and events, the premise centers on an entirely fictional murder. When the ghost of Nathaniel Hawthorne visits your study to request help in solving the mystery of his demise, he asks you to start by finding his grave. Once you agree to take his case, you’re mystically transported to a foreboding graveyard. Under the shadow of a large, stern-looking statue, you discover a headstone that shows you’ve travelled back in time to 1692 to the Puritan village of Salem, Massachusetts. From there, you begin to explore the settlement to find out what this time and place have to do with the deceased author’s death nearly two centuries later.

The artwork in the game is suitably dark and ghostly, with a color palette that draws from indigos, browns, grays, and winter whites. You’ll explore the small village and roam the dirt roads between simple clapboard houses. As you wander through the desolate paths, trees gnarled and bereft of leaves hover over you; everything appears cold, dark, and barren. You’ll also explore the wintery New Hampshire setting of Hawthorne’s death, wandering a variety of areas from presidential studies to wolf-haunted woods. The stark color scheme reflects the puritanical themes of the story, with cold shadows only occasionally broken up by iridescent shades of moonlight and the only inhabitants in town, the ghosts.

Against this beautiful 2D background, a variety of animations spruce up the experience. Not only do ravens swoop over rooftops and clouds roll across the sky, but when you rap a simple door knocker, a demon face emerges from the brass. Elsewhere, papers flung about by a petulant poltergeist fly across an empty room just before wooden chairs eerily stack themselves precariously one atop another to the ceiling, and lightning strikes a wooden bridge, resulting in a burst of flame and an explosion of wood. The opening cutscene is also well done, painting a picture of a town gone witch hunt crazy against a backdrop of flames. It can be hard to distinguish between the many different characters in the game, however, as most of them appear as wavering translucent ghosts. The point of view is a typical first-person slideshow perspective, but the developers have inserted some clever variations, like having your character look out from behind a hooded robe or peek through the openings of a bag as you follow someone’s footsteps in hiding.

There is a minimal amount of music in the game, but the designers use it to good effect. The fluttery sound of a harpsichord precedes an episode of malfeasance, and tribal drums thump in the background as you travel through sacred lands. There is no voice acting at all, so prepare yourself for a lot of reading through dialogue boxes, journals, notes, and various official documents to get the full picture of what is going on. There is some interactive dialogue with the characters in the game, though the interactivity is fairly limited. You’ll be presented with what seem to be a series of dialogue choices, but you have to click through them all to advance the story.

The hidden object searches take you through graveyards, old sheds, and deserted campsites, as well as the fabled house of seven gables. There aren’t a large number of these episodes, yet you’ll repeat visits to some locations, and I would have appreciated a few more scenes for variety. While there may not be many in the main game, however, there is an opportunity to unlock an unlimited mode. Gather enough four-leaf clovers scattered throughout your adventure and you open up this bonus mode, which provides several hidden object sets for you to play through separately. Unfortunately, while there are some new sets, most are ones that you’ve already played through in the regular story mode.