Mysterious Castle is an “escape the room” game, where players are given room to hunt down different keys and components to unlock a door and exit. Essentially it’s a glorified Eye Spy game. You must click on various things in the room, such as pictures and pillows to uncover the way to open the door. Mysterious Castle isn’t even a decent one of these.
With its poor interface, buggy mechanics, and lousy graphics everything is just kinda lost. You can try and parse through the puzzles and click on the things you think will contain keys, but that is definitely not the most efficient way to accomplish things. Where exactly you need to click on things to access them is so finicky, You could either waste a ton of time clicking on something and it doing absolutely nothing or clicking somewhere completely different trying to access another part of the room and end up in the place you were trying to get to earlier. It’s best to randomly click until you’ve solved the level. The sound design of the game may be even worse than the game design.
Every time you click on anything it makes this really irritating pinging noise. Given you have to click on a lot of things this becomes a constant in Mysterious Castle. After the first minute of playing, I was forced to completely turn the sound off. Occasionally, and by that I mean rarely the game will try to do point-and-click adventure-style puzzles, but these never consist of anything more than Combining a hammerhead with a hammer stick to create a hammer. It’s almost insulting to call anything in this game a puzzle.
On top of that, this game reuses the same puzzles again and again. Every room has a number lock in it. Part of solving the lock is to locate all the numbers. It gets so repetitive having to remember all the numbers scattered around the room and input them into the lock, time after time. Once instead of (or possibly in addition to) numbers they use card symbols. So I thought the game was going to mix up what I had to input and make it more and more interesting. But, no such luck. They immediately drop that idea and return to the numbers.
Luckily this game is pretty short. There are only ten levels to complete. Well, only nine for me. The ninth level consists of two puzzles.
One is where you flip tiles around to create a picture and the other is a picture of a rainbow and a bunch of scrabble tiles. You needed to spell out a word or something that had to do with rainbows. However, Every time I tried to put something in the scrabble pieces would either get stuck in their slot or not come out. Regardless of what piece I put into a slot, they’d get stuck.
Clicking on them caused them to turn a funny angle and glitch through the slot they were in. The other thing that would happen is that a slot would become unavailable. No matter what I did, I wasn’t able to put anything into a particular slot, forcing the puzzle to become unsolvable. I determined that this was a fitting end to this game and decided to quit.
-Jordan Kamm
An autistic gamer with opinions on games who also enjoys making dumb videos on the internet!