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Dream Day Wedding: Married in Manhattan is the latest offering in the Dream Day series. Thanks to your efforts, Jenny and Robert are living happily ever after. Jenny is hoping you can help her friend Rachel (and her fiancé Nate) and her cousin Emily (and her fiancé Jason) achieve the same level of bliss with their forthcoming nuptials.

As with the other games in the Dream Day series, this continues to be a solid offering in the hidden-object genre. To those of you unfamiliar with this type of game, basically a hidden-object game has various scenes with a multitude of objects mixed in with the normal objects of the scene. You’re given a list of objects to find in the scene and generally given a time limit in which to find those objects. And what makes this different than every other hidden-object game out there? It’s all in the details.

The graphics for Married in Manhattan are all very nicely done. I might have to ponder what a clue means, but the graphic is going to be nice when I do figure it out. The overall game has wedding-type music to set the stage, and each of the individual scenes has appropriate sound effects. Outside the travel agency, you’ll hear street sounds and people talking. The bakery sounds like people are having coffee and sampling cake.

There are actually two full games within the overall game. You have two different couples to help plan their weddings. Once you’ve finished with the first couple, you have the option of helping the second couple. Rachel and Nate are having an elegant Manhattan wedding, and Emily and Jason are doing an outdoor wedding in Central Park. Each wedding has locations specific to the particular nuptials.

Hidden within each scene you visit are two or three bluebirds. Find five bluebirds of happiness and you get an extra hint. For the most part, I found the game very easy, but I did have a few stumpers for which the hint came in handy. At the beginning of the game, I had abundant time, but toward the end, there were a couple of spots in which I hand brain lock and needed a little boost to finish before the clock ran out. My strategy was to find the bluebirds first in each level and then go find the objects. If I didn’t do that, sometimes I went through the objects so fast that I forgot to look for the birds and thus missed out on their hint power.

Each level has two to three scenes to visit and a number of objects to find in each scene. Married in Manhattan has a few twists (beyond the bird collecting) to change things up a bit. In some scenes you will hear a cell phone ringing. If you can find the phone fast enough, the bride will cross an item off of your list. There also are some spots where you end up trapped. You have to solve a multipart puzzle to get untrapped and then continue with your list. I don’t want to give away the surprise of the traps so I’m not going to go into specifics, but I enjoyed the extra challenge thrown into the game.

Between each level are a few other activities. Sometimes you’ll visit the bride’s apartment and have to solve a multipart puzzle to find the object list for the next level. There isn’t a time limit on this part, and most were easy. The only one that continues to stump me is the “Romeo” puzzle. Luckily there is an option to get through the level without solving the puzzle — like a little “get out of jail free” option.

When you’re not looking for the list at the bride’s apartment, you might be learning a little more about how the happy couple got together in the first place. These are like a choose your own adventure story. You’re given a basic setup and you get to choose between three options to see what happens next. Don’t worry — there are no bad choices. After the story segment you’re told of another hidden object you can find on the next level that adds extra time to the clock. It won’t be on the list, so you have to remember to look for it.

The other option between levels takes you to the Dream Day Registry. There are gifts you can unwrap. Each gift leads to one of two puzzles — either the Choc-o-matic or the Party Puzzle. The Choc-o-matic is a series of pipes you have to rotate to make the chocolate fountain work at the wedding. This was incredibly easy (and it even shows you the solution before it scrambles the pipes). The Party Puzzle shows little cards with one or two colors on them. You have to arrange the cards so matching colors touch all around thereby making happy seating arrangements. There’s one wild card that helps if you get stuck. Initially the puzzle had only two colors and then moved on to three colors.

Along with all of your other activities, you will run into wedding challenges. Something goes wrong with the dress, bouquet or wedding cake and you have to find all of the objects in the scrambled scene to make it right. Once you find the objects, you get to design a new dress, bouquet or cake for the bride. Your design will be in the wedding scrapbook at the end of the game. I thought this was a fun little bonus, and it’s great that the results are integrated into the wedding album.

I found Married in Manhattan to be fairly easy as hidden-objects games go, but it was quite enjoyable. The sounds and graphics are done very well. The little puzzle challenges are a welcome addition. I like that I have two different weddings to plan with different places to search. The replayability factor also is reasonably good. While the puzzles are going to be the same, the objects to find are random each time you visit a given location. You’re not going to get exactly the same list twice in a row. The “how we met” stories add another level of variety and really complement the game experience. Overall, I highly recommend Dream Day Wedding: Married in Manhattan. It’s not a brain-buster, but it is frothy, romantic fun.