Explore the disappearance of an entire town in the adventure puzzle game Tiny Room Mysteries: Town Mystery!
Format: PC via Steam
First playthrough time: 8.5 hours
Cost: 9.99 USD
Released Feb 25th, 2021 by Kiary Games
Quick Overview
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One of the simpler puzzles
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In-Depth Review
Tiny Room Mysteries: Town Mystery is an adventure puzzle game. Much like an escape room, players start most chapters in a limited area and must explore for clues, keys, and other items. Finding information to deduce passwords and other combinations is a common theme. To explore their surroundings, players can rotate their isometric view as they move between rooms. Doing so is important, as multiple walls of a room often contain important information.
Single rooms are the typical viewing level
The puzzles in Tiny Room Mysteries: Town Mystery are pretty varied, with no two exact mechanics being reused. The means to solve each puzzle is located within the chapter it appears, so players won’t need to remember information from prior chapters. Any information items (ex. documents) or keys will automatically be put down once the player has used them to their full capacity. This means players don’t have red herring inventory items to distract them. There are also video walkthroughs built into the game if the player gets stuck. I found these to be immensely useful as they showed how to find the answers and just knowing what room to pay attention to could often be enough of a hint.
In my opinion, this is one of the more complex puzzles
The story of Tiny Room Mysteries: Town Mystery focuses on the main character and his father. After a long break in communications, his father messages him out-of-the-blue to request the main character visit and help with an unknown problem. Upon arriving at the town he grew up in, the main character finds everyone in town has simply vanished. Exploration of the town indicates everyone has been missing for about a month. As the player travels to more and more locations looking for clues, they uncover an unfolding and increasingly bizarre story that still manages to explain itself well.
There’s more than one way to get a password
Tiny Room Mysteries: Town Mystery can be controlled entirely by the mouse. It also seems optimized for touch, although I did not have the hardware to test that out. While there are a fair number of passwords, these are typed out using onscreen keyboards built into the game. I would’ve liked to see keyboard shortcuts for moving between locations, especially in some of the larger grid-based areas. The keyboard is available for rotating the view, but I usually found moving locations to be the slower thing to do.
Some clues are only visible when the lights are turned off.
Recommendation
Overall, Tiny Room Mysteries: Town Mystery is a solid adventure puzzle game. It has a lot of content and a variety of puzzles. The graphics are clean and the story is detailed but clear. There are also video walkthroughs available for if/when the player gets stuck. The game is well polished with little left to be desired. The only addition I could see would be navigation via keyboard shortcuts, but that is pretty minor. I recommend Tiny Room Mysteries: Town Mystery for adventure, puzzle, and escape room fans.
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Categories: Desktop games, Video game reviews
Cthulhu's Critiques 