The very first thing I noticed when playing Legacy Tales: Mercy of the Gallows was the soothing, realistic sound of waves gently lapping, as if I were standing on a windy dock. That and the background music do a great job of setting the perfect tone for this pirate adventure.

While the sound effects throughout the game are really great, I found myself wishing the narrator would speak a little faster. I found myself cutting him off and hitting "next" because I had already read the page and the narrator was only halfway through... come on already... I don't have all day!

The graphics in Legacy Tales: Mercy of the Gallows are strikingly detailed and beautiful. Unlike other games of the genre, however, the screens took awhile to load. I thought maybe it was my computer but changing the settings or restarting didn't seem to resolve these issues, so the slowness appears to be game-based.

The main characters, William van der Decken and his wife Isabele, lived long ago and are the subject of local folklore. The sea captain and his wife lived in a fairy-tale-like castle located, of course, on a dock.

This Captain was a crusader against pirates who wreaked havoc on the townspeople and their fishing boats. The Captain and his wife, were heroes and well loved by the people of the village.

Isabelle, the Captain's wife, was always at his side. Legend has it that she slowly took ill, and was seen less and less by the townspeople, until one day, it seemed she disappeared. After her disappearance, the Captain suffered horribly and fell into a deep depression. Finally, he went off on a quest to find her himself and was never heard from again.

Years later, his rotting corpse was found washed up on a beach. He was dressed like a pirate and had a hook in place of his hand. Of course, nobody ever discovered what really happened to the Captain or if his identity was a sham. That is your job to find out!

By the time you enter the scene, the castle and ship are in disarray and full of ghosts who are trying to tell you something. Who are you to believe?

If you like the paranormal and the morbid, you will enjoy this game. There are skeletons in cages where their original owners died of hunger and thirst, and rumor has it that Isabelle used to take pity on them and give them water to make their slow deaths more bearable.

The castle has been abandoned for generations, yet, when you, the first live person to enter the grounds since before living memory, look up, you see lights on in the upstairs windows. There are also moving pink and blue lights in many scenes that signal eerie activity, especially in the graveyard!

Legacy Tales: Mercy of the Gallows requires a keener eye than other hidden object games. In different scenes, you must collect gold coins in order to unlock places in the game. You cannot solve these unless you find the coins, and the developers did a good job of hiding them.

Ready to be spooked by ghosts and uncover a watery mystery? Enter the castle, in Legacy Tales: Mercy of the Gallows... if you dare!