Nina Kalenkov is at it again. After having an apocalyptic nightmare and seeing her fiancé, Max, kidnapped, she needs to head out to find out who decided to spoil her wedding day. At the bottom of it all is an evil CERN scientist, who is trying to harness powers she does not understand, and in the nick of time, Nina and Max prevent her from creating a black hole.
This time around, Nina's role is more deeply rooted in mystery, as she has a couple of encounters with mysterious Guardians, tied to the greater mysteries of Secret Files since the first game. The powers CERN peeps fail to understand are ancient technology, which is way too powerful for mere mortals to grasp. Hence, crap hits the fan, and Nina has to rescue the day once again.
You play most of the game as Nina. There are a couple of small segments which are played with different characters, including an ancient thief who sets the story in motion and an even smaller part as Max at the end of the game. As for puzzles, Secret Files 3 might be the fairest game in the series, with surprisingly few moon logic puzzles. It might not have the greatest puzzles ever made, but unlike the previous titles in the series, this is actually fully playable without needing to read a walkthrough every minute or so.
Secret Files 3 does have 4 different endings, mainly in terms of that you get a bit different slide show at the end of the game depending on what you choose to do in a couple of locations. Depending on how much you like the game, this might be an incentive for replaying the game; otherwise, you can as easily check the minor changes from a YouTube video. There's no additional gameplay linked to any of these choices.
I don't really have much more to say about this one. It wasn't as infuriating as the previous games in the series, but at the same time, it isn't really anything special either. It's a point-and-click adventure with a bit silly mystery plot, and it didn't stay out of its welcome.
I can't say I am particularly a fan of the series. In some ways, I think the only reason I bothered playing it through was some sort of feeling of obligation, having bought it ages ago, not because I enjoyed it. Now that I have done so, I can cross the series off from my far-too-long backlog. All of the games in the series have the same feel as the budget point-and-click adventure games that were produced in Europe, mainly Germany, after the big American names stopped pushing out the games in the genre. Sierra folded thanks to the fraudulent business scheming that pushed the Williams's out of the business, and Lucasfilm games concentrated on other genres.
After the world entered the new millennium, adventure games were seen as a dead genre. But there was some life left in the cadaver, and it was mostly these European developers who kept necromancing the corpse alive.
At least back in the day, many of these games were only European treats; now, thanks to digital game platforms, they can be enjoyed by everyone who has an inkling to play games that kept the genre shambling down the hall.
Anyhow, if you are interested in giving Secret Files 3 a spin, you can get it, and the others in the series, from GOG and Steam.
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