Mystery Castle Review

As the years go on and gaming as a medium is built upon, how we measure the quality of a game alters. Currently, with increasingly powerful hardware, we tend to identify quality as being tied to graphical fidelity or how many new and inventive mechanics we can stick into our games. With that said, it’s easy to forget that simplicity is just as great. Mystery Castle is a fine example of how simplicity can benefit a game.

At its core, Mystery Castle is a puzzle game that has you going through levels collecting five items in order to unlock a door, allowing access to the next area. Throughout the entirety of the games 180 levels – that’s a lot, right? – your objective stays the same. While, initially, this objective will simply have you navigating your character around the level hassle-free, Mystery Castle quickly begins to throw interesting obstacles your way and this is where the game excels as, despite the relatively simple objective, the game remains interesting throughout.

Spread across five locations, levels introduce and combine obstacles requiring you to constantly adjust your way of thinking towards your objective; you might have to slide along the ice, avoid monsters or move blocks to create bridges. While there are characters that will occasionally tell you how things affect the world, the gameplay itself is the best mentor into the game’s many mechanics. When entering a new location, the lowest levels allow you to learn the ropes, letting you get an idea of the fundamentals of how the locations challenges work. When reaching the higher levels, however, you must use everything you have learnt as a good knowledge of a number of different mechanics is necessary.

Mystery Castle invokes the feeling of a classic NES puzzler, such as Bomberman or Kickle Cubicle, as the simplicity of the game’s controls – you only use the d-pad and the A Button to interact with doors – allows for a game that is instantly accessible but isn’t afraid to test your mental ability. This is a game all about the inventiveness of its levels and how you are forced to react to them.

The puzzles are consistently challenging but always remain fair. Even when repeatedly failing a level, I never felt cheated as, with each failure, the solution became more apparent compelling me to give it one more go. As the game goes on and your knowledge improves, it feels great when your mind puts the pieces together on a first attempt and has you flow through the level. This sense of satisfaction extends throughout the game, with each level feeling challenging enough to make you feel like a genius when you overcome it.

Each location culminates in a ‘Boss Battle’. While the use of the title is somewhat deceptive, these levels tend to be a strong climax to an area requiring you to combine your knowledge of that area’s rules in order to beat the hardest levels of the game. Those looking for Mario or Legend of Zelda style bosses might be a bit disappointed as interaction is limited making these levels feel more like extended versions of previous levels rather than a tense combat scenario against an actual enemy.