Mysteryville 2 Reviewed

Not having played Mysteryville, Mysteryville 2 instantly reminded me of Magic Academy in the game play style and interface — Nevosoft is behind both games. The developer does a first-rate job in telling a strong story in its hidden object games and continues the tradition with its latest entry.

Journalist Laura Winner returns to the little town of Eurekaberg for vacation at the invitation of a friend, but finds herself unraveling a mystery when her friend goes missing. The town also plans an auction to raise money for repairing the leaky pipes. It doesn’t take long before realizing something isn’t right about all of this.

While the characters have commentary that references the previous game, it doesn’t confuse first-timers. I love the conversations between characters as the dialog interjects a lot of humor. I would like to see the interface improve in how it displays the conversations and the characters because it looks outdated and feels unwieldy.

Having reviewed many hidden object games, it doesn’t take much to see which stand out and which are run-of-the-mill. While the game play is ordinary for a hidden objects game, the well-written story and humor stand out from the very crowded genre. The lead character and other fun characters keep you interested as you feel like a part of the story.

It’s not easy to make the characters come alive and have an identity — and Mysteryville 2 succeeds here. You get to know the characters beyond the surface and discover their flaws. The smarmy lab guy makes my skin crawl, the sheriff doesn’t earn my trust, and the restaurant owner is like an uncle who wants to take care of you. The game play, speed and object selection move along nicely except when an object is long and narrow like cigarettes. That’s when clicking gets difficult.

Besides finding hidden objects to get information from characters and clues, players compare two scenes to find differences, find objects based on shadows of the object instead of words, put jigsaw puzzles together, and search for a bunch of similar object such as business cards, gems, goblets, and beakers. Hints are available based on timing. Once used, you must wait for the hint to charge back up before you can use it again.

The game breaks up into stages where each stage involves visiting a different location — some locations require more than one trip. In total, there are 22 stages, which makes Mysteryville 2 short enough that I finished in less than a day. I liked the ending and the story potential for Mysteryville 3, which would (I hope) venture beyond the little town.

Download and try Mysteryville 2

System Requirements: Windows

• Windows ME/98/2000/XP/Vista
• 500MHz or faster processor
• 128 MB RAM
• Video card with 16 MB video ram
• DirectX 8.1 or later

[tags]pc games,Meryl K. Evans[/tags]