In this hectic world we live in, many times work and appointments must come before the fun and joys in our lives, including that of getting to play videogames whenever we want. Gone are the days when we could fire up a game of our choice and spend hours toiling away – now we seem to game in stolen moments here and there. With that in mind, perhaps it is no wonder that casual games have become such a popular gaming choice (especially with women who make up the vast majority of casual game players), as casual games allow us to either jump in and get those quick fixes of gaming bliss or either play them for as long as we want when we do have the time. In honor of the casual game, we'll be bringing you a new Casual Game of the Week every Monday to help you find that fix you might be needing in your life, and this week we have: The Blackwell Legacy

Many styles of games don't hold up over the years, namely because the gameplay and graphics are so dated they just can't dazzle us like they once could when we were younger and videogames were just starting out. Have you never played a game like Pac-Man now and wondered just what you thought was so great about it once before? A whole genre has seemingly fallen into that same rut, where people could care less about them today for the most part outside of a few exceptions. Yes, we're talking about the point-and-click adventure genre. I mean, who should care about a story driven game where all you do is point at objects and click on them to make things happen? Well, if the game in question just so happens to be The Blackwell Legacy, then you should care or else you'd miss out on a really great game.

You play as Rosangela Blackwell, a young woman living alone in New York City and getting by writing book reviews for the local newspaper. Besides scattering your dead aunt's ashes, your day starts off innocently enough with you simply trying to prove your credentials to the doorman to get yourself in your building where you live. Soon, however, you're getting a call from your boss at the newspaper to investigate a woman's suicide at the local college, which is completely new territory for you as you're nothing more than a book reviewer. Not one to say no to money though, you're soon out the door and investigating the death.

Of course then things take a turn for the strange as you meet Joey Mallone, a spirit that eventually drove your grandmother and aunt crazy, and it just so happens he is the legacy of the women in your family and you are a medium that can see ghosts. With your own wits and Joey at your side, perhaps you'll be able to figure out what's going on with the suicides in New York City, and much like Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense, you'll be able to help some ghosts reach closure and crossover to the other side.

The best thing about The Blackwell Legacy is that it has a really solid story that is both interesting and fun, with plenty of moments that will have you laughing (despite that it's a fairly somber and dark story), feeling quite attached to Rosangela, and fearing for her safety. It's strange, but the game does an excellent job at endearing Rosangela to the player, and the game does so really quickly; within an hour I was already caring for her and hoping to help her carryout her mission through the game. I've always been a fan of The Sixth Sense and even enjoyed watching the television show Medium for a spell, so it's nice to play a game that pays homage to mediums from media past, but never feels like a rip-off as The Blackwell Legacy is a completely original story and one that is pretty engrossing.

Like most point-and-click adventure games, besides the story, the other big addition is the puzzles. Puzzles in a point-and-click adventure game have to juggle easy to figure out puzzles with truly difficult ones at times, and The Blackwell Legacy balances between these two perfectly. For instance, in order to complete some dialogue based puzzles, you'll need to combine clues in your notebook to produce new entries, which you can then question people about; it may take a few tries or speaking to someone completely or either talking again to someone, but after a little patience and thinking you'll be able to put two and two together and come to your conclusion. Other puzzles can prove difficult, but then you'll smack your head at how easy it all was from the beginning; an early puzzle has you needing to talk to your neighbor, but you don't want to do so while they are performing in front of a lot of people. It's hard to know just what to do, but then you see a dog you can interact with and suddenly it will hit you that perhaps you can get the dog to wrap itself around a light pole and that might just solve your puzzle for you.

I was amazed to find that the game is fully voiced with every single line of dialogue being uttered throughout the game. It's great to see a casual game include fully voiced dialogue, it just would've been nice had it not been so bad. Every actor was seemingly cast wrong as none of the actors are very good at all with their line readings, though occasionally they will nail a line or two and deliver it properly. However, for every nailed line there are four more where someone is supposed to be in pain and they instead sound like they are annoyed more than anything else.

The graphics are also much like the audio, as the game is horribly dated and look like some of the old Lucasarts point-and-click games of years past instead of newer entries in the genre like the recent Sam and Max seasons. Despite the fact that the graphics are so dated, there is a charm to them that helps you overlook the fact that you're playing a really old looking game. You'll see pixels and jaggies everywhere you look, but those in charge of the graphics still used what they had to make the environments look pretty good, and there are some solid animations such as Rosangela walking and things like puffs of ghost smoke swirling into being.

The point-and-click adventure game is a genre that is almost on the brink of death and fading into the history of videogames, but every so often a game like The Blackwell Legacy comes around and reminds us that once this genre was the crème of the crop, and that the reason the genre hasn't completely faded away yet is because of the effort of such games as The Blackwell Legacy. Besides getting a great game, it also comes with things such as developer commentary and bloopers, making the game much like a DVD package. The voicework doesn't sound that great and the graphics are dated, but that still isn't enough to sully this great game.

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