Cruel Games: Red Riding Hood

Cruel Games: Red Riding Hood is a single-player game that plays partly as a point-and-click adventure and partly as a standard hidden object adventure. In other words: some puzzles are solved by finding objects as the player moves from one location to the next while in other parts things are given as a reward for finding all the hidden objects in a scene.

Red Riding Hood has a boyfriend, Kevin. One night after a date she returns home and finds a message from the aptly named "Maniac the Storyteller", the message reads "Welcome to my fairytale, Red Riding Hood! Your friend, Kevin, is waiting in the old cemetery behind the city. Hurry and find the poor thing before the Big Bad Wolf eats him!". The scene then cuts to a cluster of TV monitors in a dusty basement somewhere, one of which is showing the scene inside Red Riding Hood's house.

There are three locations in the game. The first, the Cemetery, has half a dozen sub locations or chapters while the second, the Town, has fifteen. The final location, the Casino, has seventeen locations. There's a in-game map which both keeps track of places visited and also shows the player where there are unresolved puzzles, as well as journal which keeps track of the unfolding story. The cursor changes automatically to a magnifying glass when something can be examined closer, to a gear when objects in the inventory can be used, and to an arrow when something can be picked up but these 'custom cursors' are optional. The game has music, sound effects, a hint system that finds difficult to locate objects, and a tutorial mode that explains the game controls in the early locations.

There are two modes of play, Casual and Expert, the difference between them being in Expert mode the hint button takes longer to recharge, there's a penalty for random clicking, and interactive areas do not sparkle. In Casual mode, the player gets the option to skip complex puzzles if they've been struggling for more than a few minutes. The game is entirely mouse controlled and can be played in either full screen or windowed mode. There are no subtitles, but then the only voice acting is a message from the killer and this is heard only during the optional introduction.