💬 Review Stranger Cases: A Mystery Escape

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Malayotome

Addicted Lv3️⃣
Member for 5 years
Name of the app you are reviewing: Stranger Cases: A Mystery Escape



An escape game with a silly storyline and uninteresting characters. Puzzles are mostly simple, but some are too tedious despite pretty obvious answers.

Review:
The game follows a detective to various locations in an oddly-shaped building to find a missing drone. The game contains 15 stages, each in a different place. Since the order for solving the game is linear, there isn't any replayability unless one skips some puzzles and wants to go back for them.

While there are a lot of side characters in the game, each only exchanged at most 3 sentences with the main. Many of them were engaged in very weird activities, but their first sentences often contained clues about the final puzzle to the next location. There was absolutely no coherent relationship between the residents in the game with the main and his client. That wasn't the focus of the game anyway, even though I would prefer they didn't exist in the first place.

While I snooped around every crook and corner of their rooms, I had to constantly suspend my disbelief that these people didn't bother with such an insolent intruder. Nobody stirred even a tiny muscle or batted an eyelash. When the owner of the place is the villain, things became the weirdest. How convenient to have the bad guy stand still like a statue while the hero destroys all his evil plans!

The puzzles were rather old if you've been playing many famous escape puzzle games before. Given my exposure to 999, Agent A, Tasokare Hotel, Yotsume God, Guilty Alice, Lost Cat Story, etc., many puzzles in this game became overly familiar. However, the harder part was combining items. Many of the combinations made no sense, and the crappy visual of objects didn't help me recognize what they were or how to use them subsequently. So, guiltily, I had to rely on a lot of hints whenever it came to object combinations. Even after all those hints, I still couldn't tell what they were. It would be so much better if there were some way to examine items like in all other escape puzzle games that I played.

I muted the game the whole time, so no comments regarding the bgm or sound effects. Maybe it could have made the whole experience more enjoyable (or worse? who knows?).

Would you recommend this to other users? No, I think I wasted a few hours on this, even though I would have tossed and toiled due to insomnia anyway.

If you haven't tried Agent A: A Puzzle in Disguise, it's a much better mobile game for those new to the escape game genre with just as few dialogues, yet a much more coherent plot.

Rating (1-5): ⭐
 
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