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Are you looking for a new occupation?  If so then you might be interested to discover that Animal Globe magazine has an opening for a photographer to work on a special project.  To learn more about this job, and the special project it involves, you will need to check out The Red Book.  This is a Hidden Object game developed by Jet Dogs Studio to judge your aptitude for the skills the work requires.

Allowing different people to play the game, profiles can be created to record their performance and progress.  Adjustments can be made to the volume levels used by background music and sound effects.  The game can be played in full screen mode using a custom cursor.  There is no option to select from various difficulty levels as everybody is to be judge on the same standard.

As part of your introduction to the Animal Globe Magazine, you are informed that the publication recently gave several column inches and free publicity to the work of Professor Niward.  While hardly a member of the mainstream scientific community, the Professor announced his discovery of the existence of several hidden species of undiscovered creatures.  These were creatures who had been affected somehow by accelerated evolution and had, as a result, developed in different unusual ways.  The Magazine really went to town on its coverage of this story. 

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Because of its support for the Professor's work, the Magazine had faced massive ridicule.  In an attempt to alleviate this situation and regain its professional standing, the Magazine now needs to publish photographic evidence of the existence of these rare animals in a special supplement titled The Red Book.  You will be hired to find and photograph these usual creatures to prove to the world that the Magazine's original story was well founded.

Your task will start with the Quokkas.  This is a small marsupial member of the macropad family.  Once photographed then you can move on and track down other creatures such as the Quilled Rabbit Bookworm, Blue Mossy Hedgehog, Eggplant Cat and the Venetian Masquerade Beaver amongst others.

There are three stages involved in the finding and recording the results for each of the unusual creatures.  You start with a fairly typical Hidden Object scene which combines a scene populated with numerous integrated items with an overlaid area featuring any required tasks for that scene.  Due to space restrictions, only six of the required list of items can be shown at one time and only those shows will be selectable from the scene. 

As each item is located it will vacate the list and be replaced by another item.  You will also need to locate the unusual creature within the scene.  A silhouette of the creature will be shown to the left of the required list.  Keeping the unusual creature company in the scene will be up to ten animals of a similar type and various butterflies which, as butterflies tend to do, constantly move about.  You need to collect the butterflies and similar creatures for the best results.

You can then move on to a Clutter stage.  Each Clutter stage or scene will come with its own set of rules.  In some cases you might be asked to find a set of 2, 3 or 4 similar items from a scattered scene.  Additional rules could add further restrictions including colour and size issues plus an insistence that only those images displayed in a changeable list running down the right side of the screen can be selected from the main scene.

With Stage three, this tends to concentrate its actions on the recreation of a scene that is divided into sections which need to be replaced in the correct position.  Often the image used will involve the unusual creature.  As with the Clutter scenes, the recreation scene will have its own set of rules.  Sometimes sections can only be swapped with an adjacent section in a particular direction.  This could involve a diagonal or sideways movement.  Occasionally image recreation is replaced with a game of concentration using face down cards. The image of the creature will then be added to The Red Book and you can prepare yourself to target the next creature.

Apart from a Hint feature, which takes a minute to recharge after each use, in the first stage of the search progress, the game leaves you to your own resources regarding how to complete its tasks.  I feel the game will only really appeal to fans of the Hidden Object genre although some of the puzzle elements were challenging.  I downloaded my copy of the game from Gamehouse.com where it is priced at $9.99.  The game can also be downloaded from Big Fish Games priced at £8.01. The game requires a 1,0 GHz processor with 512MB of RAM and 263MB of hard disk space running Windows 7 and later.

The Red Book | Big Fish (bigfishgames.com)

The Red Book | GameHouse