Mystery Mansion

Believe it or not, but Mystery Mansion was one of those games you'd try in the early 2000s when you grabbed a random box off the shelf. No publisher name, no clear genre, no magazine reviews — just hope and effort that it wouldn't be a complete disaster.

It's a hidden object adventure with logic puzzles, set in the rooms of an ancient house where a hundred things are scattered around, and your job is to figure out which one belongs where. The game gives you a list of what you need to find, and then you can torture yourself looking at something on screen but unsure if that's the right item or not. Everything is hidden somewhere in the house — in drawers, behind pictures, under carpets. You solve puzzles, unlock doors, move to new rooms, and collect the next list of items for the next puzzle.

The controls are slow and clunky, as befits a DOS point-and-click. You physically move through rooms in a limited 3D space that looks more like a paper model than an actual house. The graphics are basic, the sounds are barely sound substitutes. But that's not a problem at all — you can't fault these early 2000s clickers for looking like board game models. But the gameplay is frustrating: things are hard to find, the clickable spots are dead as a broken egg, and sometimes you feel stuck in a dead end because you missed a little whistle or a book hidden somewhere you'd never expect.

Mystery Mansion is exactly the type of game where you'd play it, be angry for twenty minutes, and never see it again. It's not a bad game, but it's not interesting either. It doesn't stick in your memory like Myst or Shivers. It's honest, but dull and unwelcoming.

These days you can play it without much hassle — it runs on emulators and in your browser — but try not to expose yourself to it for more than a few minutes without Coffee. If you're drawn to old point-and-click adventures and have the patience to hunt for things in dead corners, give it a shot. Everyone else should try Myst in HD remaster instead. Same kind of fun, but without the frustration.