Tiny Room Stories: Town Mystery

Town Mystery is a point and click adventure that feels like an "escape the room" game. The logic puzzles themselves are on the forefront, leaving the plot in the background, as you explore and search around in look for clues and objects to unlock doors, mechanisms, devices, etc. There is no character interaction either (this is justified by the plot), so you're left by yourself to investigate and squeeze your brains skills.


The good things:

-The overall design. There is a very good balance between hard, smart puzzles and a thoughtful game design that helps the player reach each goal. First off, there are no unfair puzzles, no "ugh... come on! how was I supposed to know that?" moments, if you know what I mean. So solving everything without extra clues or help is very satisfying in this game. You may get stuck for a good while, but everything has a very logical solution if you look at things and think hard enough. The few times I looked the solution up I regretted it, realizing that I could have done it by myself if I just kept at it instead of giving up.

(As a side-note, I'd say that the only one exception to all of this would be puzzle of the paper pieces with pirate skulls in it, in the diving level. You can "solve it" by yourself by just trying the least absurd options, but the logic to it is a little flawed, in my opinion.)

But I think that one of the best design decisions in this game is how the whole visual element is presented. -to elaborate-

Now, some people complain that a lot of the puzzles feel out of context and have repetitive elements -symbols, mechanisms...-, and that is true, but I see that as a typical element of certain types of games than a flaw. Think that it's impossible to make every single puzzle totally different when the whole game is basically made of -and progressed through- them. Anyways, the repetition/similarity factor doesn't make things any easier to solve, though, as the logic itself of the puzzles never repeats completely.

-The difficulty does a smooth progressive curve (it also drops down sometimes to let you breathe after the harder levels). The level of difficulty can be quite high at some points, but by then, the game has been getting you ready for it. This makes Town Mystery a very good game to recommend to players that are not used to hard point-and-clicks.

-The progress in the story is slow enough to get you hooked wanting for more, without being boring.

The bad things:

-The English translation is not perfect. This gives an amateurish feel to the game sometimes, and there is one specific puzzle where I got stuck by the misleading translation ("account password" when there's no "account" involved at all, it's just a door password).

-The plot is not as exploited as it could be, at all. The ending scene -not the ending itself, but how it is presented- is quite underwhelming.

Most mobile games emphasize on gameplay elements, things that you can do one after the other, that you can resume at any time without having to remember a long and complex story or what you were doing several levels ago. And although I mostly dislike that, I think that Town Mystery manages to make it work well and not feel absurd or disconnected.