The Mysterious City: Cairo

OS: Windows XP/Vista
CPU: 800 Mhz or faster Processor
RAM: 256 MB
Hard Drive: 66 MB

The Mysterious City: Cairo review

The Mysterious City: Cairo is a sequel to the previous game in the series – The Mysterious City: Golden Prague with updated locations and storyline. There is nothing really new in the game except for the locations, objects and the story. However, it’s still a solid hidden objects game with all the necessary hidden object games attributes – searching items by description, by shapes and comparing scenes. It also features several jigsaw puzzles style mini-games to add variety.

While the Golden Prague game had a fresh location not used in the other hidden object games, the Mysterious City: Cairo takes place in a location which is somewhat overused by the hidden object games. The story is also lacking originality or interest, so the first game was better in this sense. However, if you don’t care about the story and just want the hidden object fun, then the Cairo should do just fine.

The game has some slight problems with recognizing the correct click on the object – and sometimes you might miss an object even though you’ve clicked inside it. But it’s nothing major, you will get adapted to it rather quickly. The gameplay is pretty challenging, but not very hard. There are some items which are hard to find, it’s sometimes hard to find the differences between the scenes when there are only small changes, but overall most objects are clear and should provide no big problems to identify.

If you get stuck, you can always use a hint, which takes 2 minutes from your game time. You’re given 45 minutes per game day in normal mode, or 100 minutes in a relaxed mode, each game days spans across 8 levels, for a total of 56 levels and 7 days in the game. The hint has it’s drawbacks, as it always asks you to confirm you agree that you lose 2 minutes, which gets annoying after some time, and the hint itself is not clearly indicated, and sometimes it’s hard to spot where is the hint indicator itself.

The jigsaw style puzzles provide a nice change from the hidden objects gameplay, and get increasingly harder (more and smaller pieces) with each level. The puzzles include swapping pieces and rotating pieces puzzles.

The nice reward for finishing levels is that you unlock Egyptian theme wallpapers every few levels. You can put these themes as wallpaper for your PC’s desktop.

Conclusions: All in all, The Mysterious City: Cairo is a pretty decent hidden object game with everything a hidden object game should have. It features overused Egyptian theme, a few interface drawbacks, but overall it’s an average hidden object game. If you like the games of this type and don’t care that much about storyline and off-game elements, you should like this game. On the other hand, if the story and presentation is important to you, you should probably stay away from this game.