Review by Hunter’s Wife:

For a seek n’ find game, this is the easiest one to see. While some things take a bit to find, the images are not filled with overcrowded miscellany.

The complaint I’ve had in the past with other games is that they are timed. It becomes a death race to find the last white-on-white feather on a bridal dress… Buckingham Palace has two modes; timed and relaxed. You can play the entire game in relax mode, which is awesome. You are also not penalized for hitting the wrong object or some other part of the screen when you are moving the image.

The game also provides little factoids about each area of Buckingham Palace. Its kind of cool. There is also a storyline that requires you to solve puzzles with items you found in previous locations. Solving these puzzles enables you to move to the next chapter and acquire the crown jewels. The mini-puzzles are very easy to solve.

Its not Million-Heir, but its beats that stupid Bridezilla game anyday…

Review by Dick Johnson:

As an Anglophile, I was really looking forward to this game. While it seems a little sacrilegious to hang a pretzel on a wall of the palace, I guess the Royals will survive the shock.

The game is set up in several stages with 2-5 ‘rooms’ in which we play seek and find. Some of the items that are found are added to our inventory. At the end of each stage we have to solve a puzzle with the items in our inventory.

You can play this in ‘Relaxed’ or ‘Timed’ mode. There is a ‘Hint’ feature as well that is cleverly handled. You probably won’t need it, but it is there. The payment system for the hints requires you to find crowns in each room.

The best thing about this game is that the items you are seeking are actually visible! Some are better hidden than others, but a little time looking will pay off. I enjoyed the game but I wish it had been a little more difficult. While the puzzles can be tricky, they aren’t all that hard.

This was a pretty short game – maybe 6 hours – with no replay value unless you wait a long time to forget the solutions to the puzzles. But, it was fun for those hours.

If you like seek and find, then do get this one. It is above average in enjoyment.

Hint: take notes as you go. Some will not be of any help, but you don’t know ahead of time what will be helpful in solving the puzzles. Plus, it adds a little time and interest to the story line of the game.

Review by critters:

Hidden Mysteries–Buckingham Palace is a pretty, if short, little game. It’s mostly a hidden object game (HOG), with a few relatively easy puzzles thrown in. Many of the puzzles may be solved for you if you wish, and the unique hint system for the hidden objects is worth noting. While there are enough searching locations to avoid boredom, in my opinion, only the crowns move, so it’s not the hardest HOG around. This is a plus to me because I was looking for a relatively easy, non-brainbusting game. The informational tidbits about the rooms were fun and weren’t, to my recollection, repeated even when the room itself was.

“Buckingham Palace” is fine for the hearing impaired because there is no dialogue, and the informational tidbits are fully captioned for all. I’m not even sure whether I put the sound on at all, although I usually try to do so at least once. It would probably be fine for a pretty large amount of vision loss as well because the hint bubbles are nicely large, and the objects tend to be so as well.

Review by J. Reid:

Not a bad game, although they could have hidden the items a lot better. The worst part was the morbid music. Made me feel like I was at a funeral. Depressing. My advice – keep the sound off.

Review by ellen:

Firstly I would like to say I am a long time fan of Anne Perry – I have followed all of her series and appreciate her accuracy and attention to detail as she takes us into. Two of her series are placed in the Victorian Era.

It is an earlier time with the Monk series, but with Thomas and Charlotte Pitt series, it is the waning days of the Victorian era – After Prince Albert died, Queen Victoria was almost a recluse in her grief and didn’t execute her duties as she did.

The Thomas and Charlotte Pitt series has always been charming because it features a working class man, a policeman, Thomas Pitt, who through a murder investigation met a gentry family, and one of their daughters, Charlotte, and they fall in love and marry. She has to adjust to doing her own chores, and he has guilty feelings he is depriving Charlotte with the luxuries she is accustomed to – But they are rich with the love and respect they have with each other. They have 2 children, and have a maid, a whisp of a young woman, Gracie Phipps, who helps them. She literally grows up in the Pitt household.

The charm of this series is Mrs. Perry used all the adult characters to be involved in the mystery and resolution of it. But as Pitt has progressed from policeman to a member of Special Services, that cannot happen as readily. But this outing it is Gracie Phipps’ time to shine.

There has been a murder in Buckingham Palace. The Queen is away and the Prince of Wales and his buds are at play, in the guise of meeting to plan a railroad that will run the span of Africa…when the ladies go to bed, they have prostitutes come in to ‘entertain’ them. Something goes wrong and one of the girls is found in the laundry closet and is naked and gutted – blood all around the sheets – and the Queen’s sheets to boot!

With the sensitive nature of the crime, Narraway and Pitt are called in to find what happened and on the QT handle it.

Charlotte, and her sister Emily cannot come on this type of investigation. They used to go in and glean facts and clues for him in social situations, and enlist help from Emily’s great aunt in law Aunt Vespasia Cumming Gould – she is a jewel in this series – once was hailed as the most beautiful woman of her time, she is still beautiful in the winter of her life and loves to help them.

But the only person who may be able to help in this Buckingham Palace mystery is Gracie Phipps – she is put undercover as a maid in the palace to see if she can find clues – servants in those days were just about invisible – they could be standing in back of guests dining and the guests treated them as if they weren’t there – and the servants could hear a lot of juicy things…

There are brief appearances by our friends, Charlotte, Emily, etc. But thank goodness, Narraway goes to Lady Vespasia for advise about the people involved in the murder investigation. Her part is too short, but much longer than our other friends we are accustomed to seeing in the Pitt books.

The mystery is well layered with twists and turns, and Gracie learns that she is capable of helping Thomas. The difference in class is such a major factor – many of the servants even in the Palace cannot read – and they make a big deal that Gracie can read – and even read Oscar Wilde!

Palace’s resolution is handled well, and it is another excellent work by Perry –

Hopefully Perry will give us more of our friends in the next Pitt book.

But Perry continues to write true reflections of the time.

Review by tregatt:

Anne Perry delivers yet again with this deliciously perplexing Thomas Pitt installment, “Buckingham Palace Gardens.”

When one of the prostitutes hired to entertain the Prince of Wales and his four male companions is found butchered in a linen cupboard at Buckingham Palace, the Prince immediately summons the services of the Special Branch to clean up the mess and see that there is no scandal. And the police officer ordered to oversee such a miracle? None other than Thomas Pitt. Honest and with a strong sense of right and wrong, Pitt soon finds many of his cherished illusions about royalty sorely tested by developments in the case. But time is of the essence: the Queen is due back and the scandal must be death with before her return. And when Pitt’s investigations reveal that the murderer can only be one of the Prince’s friends, he quickly realises that he needs help ferreting out the truth about the rich and powerful. And so, while his superior, Narraway, flies around London using his contacts to find out more about the Prince’s friends, Pitt enlists the help of his maid, Gracie, to discover the gossip “belowstairs” among the palace servants, never really anticipating the scope of conspiracy he would uncover and the effect it could have on his career…

The disappointing part about “Buckingham Palace Gardens” is that Charlotte Pitt barely makes an appearance in this particular outing; I did miss her presence and the input that she could have provided this particular installment. That said, I thoroughly enjoyed “Buckingham Palace Gardens” and the manner in which Anne Perry used Gracie to act as Pitt’s foil. As usual, the period details and ambiance were superb, and her character portrayals vivid and lifelike. At heart, the story-line was a deceptively simple one; but Perry did such a fantastic job of layering plot twist upon plot twist, that this seemingly simple mystery became an engagingly perplexing conundrum for Pitt and us to solve. If I had any criticism, it was that I didn’t fully understand the reasons why one of the characters conspired against another — but perhaps a rereading of the novel is in order. All in all, however, I’d say that “Buckingham Palace Gardens” was a delightfully engrossing read.