Mysteryville

OS: Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Me, Windows 98SE
Memory: 128 MB
DirectX: 8.1 or later
CPU: P500
Video: 16MB Video Card

Mysteryville review

Playing as Laura Winner, the reporter, you visit a small town (Mysterville) and strange cats missing mystery is brought to your attention. As a good journalist, you decide to investigate this case, and that’s where the game begins. The storyline is somewhat boring, predictable and unimaginative. The characters, who tell the story, are done very well though. You even have an option to interact with them, although it appears that your choices do not change anything at all, other than a bit different dialogs wording.

Mysterville doesn’t offer anything unique to the genre. It even doesn’t feature puzzle mini-games to mix up the action, instead you just keep playing hidden object scenes over and over. While there are 21 locations, what you do is essentially the same everywhere. The objects are reused between locations and are placed in different random places, but the game modes, even though a bit varied, keep repeating. There are a few variations available: find objects from the list by their names or shapes, find all objects of a certain type (such as all cards or all bottles), flashlight mode (where the light is turned off, and your mouse serves as a flashlight, making it harder to search for the items) and finally, spot the difference mode, where you have to search differences between two pictures shown. During each scene you have hints, which recover with time (you can take hint about once every minute).

The hidden object gameplay is decent, but due to lack of variety it becomes boring rather quickly. It’s good to play this game 1-2 scenes a day in a free time, but if you try to finish it in just one seating, you risk falling asleep.

Conclusions: Mysterville is an average hidden object game with boring story and as boring gameplay. While it’s seek and find action is solid, there is nothing new and not enough variety to keep players interested. Good for short playing sessions, but extremely boring for long sessions.