You will then arrive at the locale of the party, the house you designed, Professor Y's small mansion. The action takes place primarily in five rooms although there are several intro screens. The rooms are the living room, dining room, kitchen, den and balcony. Each room has four views.

Although very tempting, none of the features in a room can be operated, picked up or even taken as a clue. The mystery will be solved through character interaction alone. This is not a "hunt for object - use object" environment. Too bad considering the number of sliding doors, elevating book shelves, pool-put games, retracting kitchen utilities, exit and entrance poles, etc.

To navigate, you can turn left or right by clicking on the left or right side of the screen, you can go through doors by clicking through them and you can turn right around by clicking on the bottom of the screen. All views are 90 degrees to one another to keep it simple.

Click on the people in the mystery to talk to them. At first your cursor will be a wine glass representing a greeting. Once they greet you your cursor will be a question mark. A menu of topics that you know about will pop up when you question a character. Click on the topic that you want to ask the character about. You will see that your topic list grows as you proceed through the mystery learning things.

You know some things about a few of the guests so as soon as you can, you should check your memory!

Characters will ask you questions too. When they do, the answers that you know will appear in a text field at the bottom of the screen. Select a desired answer.

Statements are passed on as the characters interact with one another - even in other rooms as you play. This is called OSCI or Off Screen Character Interaction. Each character has different secret keeping abilities and it may be easier to get interesting facts from certain characters especially if the statement is not important to them.

Notice the heads are turned toward the person talking. As the person talks, their mouth is animated. Everyone's eyes blink and each person has a special movement. Characters relocate themselves and may be sitting or standing at various times throughout the party.

It is possible that the characters will know something but not tell you because they do not want to or because someone daunting is in the room. In any case, there are a variety of different responses for a number of situations.

For controls you have Faster and Slower located in the left margin which control the text display speed as a character talks. You can display the next line immediately by clicking anywhere. The Guests button shows you what guests you have met and their names. They are displayed on a cuckoo clock which keeps the effective time you have been in the mystery.

You can Save your current position so when you start the mystery later you will be exactly where you left off. The Restart button works on first click so be careful.

House will display your blueprint drawing that the Professor returned to you at the party. To put the blueprint away, click on it. Solve gives you a chance to solve the mystery. You must accuse someone of having the painting and present three clues as evidence. The three clues are each formulated from a pair of topics.

You can have a character repeat what they said by pressing Pardon? Selecting Memory then a topic from a topic list will retrieve all that you remember about the topic. This includes what people have told you and who asked you what questions.

Finally, there is a help screen right in the mystery. Have fun and please donate to the Hat.