Mystery Case Files: Prime Suspects
It's always a real pleasure to find a new game.I don't mean a game that's been covered in a thousand previews, with double-page spreads in every gaming magazine on the planet, with a single screenshot a day released for six months. Those games are all part of an industry hype machine whose optimism is self-sustaining and self-fulfilling.
What I'm talking about is a game that's so far under the radar it doesn't even have a listing in over at Moby Games. A game with almost zero publicity. A game that's just hopelessly addictive.
A game called Mystery Case Files: Prime Suspects.
Make no mistake: I don't usually play puzzle games for long. I'm more than willing to play for thirty minutes, and they're almost all interesting for that long, but somewhere between thirty minutes and sixty, the play mechanics start to feel repetitive and the difficulty level goes off the charts.
And I'm done.
Mystery Case Files, though, is amazing. I've played it for over five hours at this point and it's impossible to stop. The basic setup is that you're presented with different locations (each represented by one screen), and at each location are a number of items that you need to find. The catch is that there are hundreds of items on the screen at each location, and the items range from mundane to downright wacky. So you have to carefully search each screen to find the items, and when you find one, you click on it.
An individual episode might involve anywhere from four to eight locations, with eight items at each location to find. If you find enough items, you're taken to a puzzle screen where there's a picture that can solve that episode.
That picture has to be unscrambled, though, through a word puzzle or a Concentration-like game or by shuffling image tiles.
That probably sounds pretty straightforward. There are so many items on each screen, though, that particular items can be very difficult to find. And the longer it takes to find them, the more intensely you look.
And there's a time limit.
There's nothing like scrambling to find a key or a stork or a bow as your time is ticking away, knowing that you still have to leave enough time to solve the picture puzzle.
You get a few free hints on each level, which helps. And if you run out of time, you get to see the same level again--different items to find, but the same locations, and having seen the screens before, it makes everything more familiar and even different items are easier to find.
It's well-written and very clever. It's extremely well-balanced and terrifically designed. And it's very compulsive in a good way. It's one of the very few games I've ever played that is fun both for casual gamers and for people who play games all the time. It's a gem.
And here's something else about the game that's very cool: DQ reader Dave Kramer is a Product Manager for Big Fish Games, who developed the game.
So if you get a chance, go check out the free demo here:
http://tinyurl.com/jw8mb.
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