Unsolved Mystery Club: Amelia Earhart is all about teaching you who Earhart was and presenting you with the different theories over the lady pilot's disappearance. This task is broken up into four segments. As you progress through the mystery, old news footage, audio clips and photos will be unlocked showing not only what Amelia was like, but also what the world was like at the time. The game also presents two types of hidden object puzzles and a series of flight simulation (a term used very loosely here) mini-games.
As you learn about a new era in Earhart's life, you will be tasked with the job of hopping between several different screens looking for particular objects. For the most part, these objects are random and don't really have a bearing on the game as a whole. What is unusual about Unsolved Mystery Club is that you can't find everything on a screen the first time you visit it. There are always a couple of items hidden behind, under or in something on the screen. Thankfully, the game lets you know this and basically tells you what you need in order to get the locked item. For instance, the list of objects will have a necklace, but it will let you know (by coloring it blue) that you will need an inventory item to get to it since it is in a wooden crate. Well, on a different screen, you will find that one of the items you need to find is a saw. When you find and pick it up, instead of the item just being crossed off your list, it also goes into your inventory and you can use that on the crate to get at the necklace.
Each of these sets of locations are designed so that you have to visit all of them in order to finish all of them. Basically, if there are two locked items on a screen, you can bet the necessary inventory item will be in the other two screens and not together. Once you've found everything on your list, you are tasked with finding one more object at each of the locations. These "Artifacts" are something much more personal to Earhart and you learn a bit about her when you find them. The only problem here is, you don't know what you are looking for.
Once you complete these fairly basic hidden object puzzles, you then learn about one of the theories behind the Earhart mystery and you travel to the location that particular theory believes she landed. There you are relegated to only a couple of screens and are looking for clues to her presence. Instead of being given a list of things to search for, your cursor becomes a hot/cold indicator that beeps faster and faster as you get closer to something of interest. Once you are done with this task, its off to a bit of flight training and then it all starts back over again with a new bit of old-time footage.
The flight training is a series of mini-games and puzzles that will have you doing everything from guiding your plane through a series of hoops to figuring out how to take off by setting various gauges to different colors. While a nice distraction from the picture hunting aspect of the rest of the game, and is definitely connected to the Earhart theme of the rest of the product, I was never too impressed with these forays into flight training.
