Murder

How to play Murder

• Read the list of objects to find.
• Search the scene and click each one.
• Correct finds are ticked off the list.
• Random clicking is penalised, so look before clicking.
• Clear the list to finish the scene.

Darkness is not the trick

The scenes are dim, but the objects are not hidden by shadow. They are hidden by clutter and by outline, sitting inside a shape that reads as something else until you look directly at it.

Turning up your screen brightness helps less than most players expect. Slowing down helps far more.

Tips and strategy

Search in a grid

Divide the scene into a rough grid and clear one cell at a time. It feels slow and it is much faster than sweeping your eyes around the picture, which is what everybody does by default and which produces the same three finds over and over.

Read the object name properly

• Name the shape you are hunting before you start looking.
• Decide its likely size relative to the scene, because scale is the thing people misjudge most.
• Remember it may be partly covered, rotated, or drawn at an odd angle.
• Look for the fragment, not the whole thing.

Where things hide

• Half out of frame at the edges of the picture.
• Inside the outline of a larger object, sharing its silhouette.
• Along the very top of the scene, above where the action is.
• In the darkest corner, which most players skip because they assume it is decoration.

The last item

When one object refuses to appear, go back to the part of the scene you searched first. Your eye had not yet adjusted to the artist's style then, and that is where the miss almost always is.