Carol Reed 14: The Fall of April

 

 

Genre:    Adventure 

Developer:   MDNA Games

Publisher:    MDNA Games 

Released:   January 2, 2019              

Requirements (minimum):

 

  • OS: Windows 98,XP,Vista,7,8,or 10 or Mac OSX 10.7 or higher
  • Memory: 512 MB RAM
  • Storage: 1.2 GB available space
  • Minimum resolution: 1280x720
  • Additional notes: The game can be run on any modern Windows or Mac computer

 

 

By Jenny 100

 

Carol Reed 14: The Fall of April

MDNA Games

For those unfamiliar with the Carol Reed series of games, Carol is an Englishwoman living in Sweden who solves mysteries. The Carol Reed games are first person point-and-click and make use of photographs of real people and places instead of pre-rendered graphics or 3D.

Story

The Fall of April starts with Carol meeting her friend Jonas for coffee. Jonas buys her a cold drink, gives her treadmill lubricant, and asks her for a favor. He wants her to use her detective skills to find out what happened to his friend's sister, Andrea Valli, who was found unconscious and has lost her memory of the previous day. Andrea's daughter was found dead two years ago and the police never found out what happened to her. Carol has her mystery to solve. Is there a connection between the events of the past and Andrea's current situation? Carol gets to work, following a trail of threatening notes to discover what happened to Andrea and why.

Locations

Carol Reed games always feature some aspect of Swedish history. In the Fall of April, Carol visits various places the Lourdesville Rock Carvings, the Coquina Mine Route, the Grand Coral Quarry, the Aviation Gallery, an off-season ski slope, and various houses and apartments that belong to characters in the game. She also visits a place labeled the Suchet Museum. Carol learns about Andrew Suchet's ill-fated trip to the North Pole by balloon in the early 20th century (1915). The balloon was named April, after the wife of Andrew Suchet. Hence the title of the game.

Andrew Suchet may have existed in Carol's reality, but neither the Wikipedia nor Google in our reality have heard of him in our reality. Instead the 1915 Suchet expedition in the game seems to have been based on the failed 1897 polar expedition led by Salomon August Andrée, and accompanied by Nils Strindberg and Knut Fraenkel. Andrée's balloon was named Örnen (The Eagle) and not April. Most adventure game fans can hazard a guess where the name April came from. There are reasons for changing the explorer's name and the date of the expedition, but to explain why would probably be spoilers.

The game begins in Carol's apartment, where you can look around and admire all Carol's adventure games. She seems to be playing Zork Grand Inquisitor (at least it's sitting out on her desk, ready to go). Carol enjoys a wide variety of adventure games ranging from the early Sierra Quest games through puzzlers like RHEM, Schizm, and Myst, through 1990's FMV like Dracula Unleashed, The Daedalus Encounter, and The Elk Moon Murders through edutainment like Crusader, Physicus, and Pompeii. She also dabbles in non-adventure games, like The Nomad Soul, Theme Park World and Max Payne. It's always fun to look through Carol's collection of games to see how many you recognize.

Carol keeps her winemaking equipment near her games, and you can hear the wine-to-be bubbling away when you are in the room.

Starting the game

The game has high definition (1920x1080) and low definition (1280x720) versions which use separate installation files. Use the one appropriate for your monitor's maximum resolution.

The first time you start the game a window will pop up confirming whether your video and sound have been detected correctly. My computer uses onboard sound and doesn't have a separate sound card, and the game detected it as "Primary Sound Driver" which worked fine. There are checkboxes for "Use same resolution as your desktop", "Run in window", and "Don't show this window again." Click the OK button to continue starting the game.

Controls

After choosing "New Game" you are prompted for whether you'd like a tutorial or not. The tutorial reviews standard point-and-click actions such as left-clicking an object to pick it up, and right-clicking the object in inventory to see a close-up and description of the object. Inventory is shown along the top of the screen. Move your mouse to the top of the screen to make it appear. The tutorial shows you how to combine items and use them in the environment.

The space bar highlights active areas in the game. A long rainbow-colored crystal lights up in the upper left of the screen when you find something that opens a new area on the map. When you access the map after a new location appears, the new location will blink to call attention to itself. If you are stuck for what to do next, click Carol's notebook at the left of the Inventory bar to access the Hint system.

Right-clicking the screen brings up the Main Menu. The Main Menu has Resume, New Game, Load, Save, Options, and Quit. The Options Menu includes Speech Volume, Music Volume, Effects Volume, and Subtitles On or Off.

Manual saving is allowed. The game also autosaves on exit. There appear to be 108 save slots (9 pages of 12 slots each) but the MDNA website says there are 100. Perhaps the autosaves use up separate slots.

Recommended to any fan of the Carol Reed games.

 

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