Following Freeware: March 2013 releases

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The Grey Rainbow

The world you live in is an unremitting landscape of grey boring buildings. Then one day you suddenly find yourself summoned to a land of bright colours and magic. But this land is under threat from a rainbow of grey that stretches across the sky above. With the inhabitants of the land powerless to stop its advance, your connection with the land of grey is seen to be the key to salvation. Embrace the magic of this place, and in so doing, save it from destruction.

Black Olive Games have created a fairy tale with a touch of the modern world. The graphics are done in a hand-drawn slideshow format. The art style is almost child-like in appearance, though with well-proportioned characters and moderately detailed settings. After an introduction showing the grey skyscrapers of your own world, the remainder of the game is brightly coloured, with only the titular rainbow casting a pall over the land. You will traverse an enchanted forest, visit the spirit of the land on an impossibly high mountain and seek help in a small village with mice shopkeepers. The majority of the action is in first-person, with non-animated comic panel cutscenes between major events showing the male protagonist. The background music goes well with the setting, having a gentle folksy tone.

Your initial task is to scale the mountain where the spirit of the land will be able to guide your quest. From this point onwards you will undertake a number of mini-quests to gather the required ingredients to reverse the malignant effects of the rainbow. The inhabitants of this world, such as a sentient tree and a cloud that has let itself fall perilously low, will help you in your adventure if you can persuade them to do so. This will often involve solving a problem they have, such as disentangling the cloud from the branches in which it is caught. Along with character interaction, you will use inventory, sometimes in combination, to further your goal. The characters and locations further the peaceful fairy tale atmosphere created by the visual presentation.

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The Grey Rainbow can be played online at JayisGames.

Scene of the Crime: Dream of Murder

Out in the desert, a car has driven off the road with its front end embedded in a pole. But this car has a dead body in the boot, clearly not a victim of the crash. As the detective assigned to the case, what looks like a simple body dump proves more complicated with the discovery of a second body and the FBI warning you off the case. With everything stacked against you, can you pin down the truth behind these grisly events?

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