Tag Archives: mobile

Eleven Puzzles: Unsolved Case | Review

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A new lead turns up old doubts about an ‘Unsolved Case’. A trap, or a copycat killer? In this co-op puzzle game prequel to the award-winning Cryptic Killer series, put on your detective badges as you collaborate and communicate to crack the codes, solve the riddles, and catch the Cryptic Killer.

Date Played: April 2023
Number of Players: 2
Time Taken: 30 mins
Difficulty: Easy

Although we became very familiar with digital escape rooms over the course of the pandemic, it’s been a while since I’ve played one. Last year I covered “Parallel Lab” by Eleven Puzzles, and greatly enjoyed it, so when I saw they had just released a new (free!) game, I absolutely had to play it. This is actually the first part of a larger game set to be released soon, which is even more exciting!

 

Unsolved Case Mobile Game Review

 

The Premise

Much like their previous game, this game requires two players on separate devices. This game actually supports cross-device playing, which meant I was able to Skype my mum and play on my computer, while she used her iPad, which she is more used to than playing on a computer. Part of the reason I love the Eleven Puzzles games so much is their ease of play – you are not tied to what the other person is doing and are fairly free to roam and interact as you like, and the gameplay is pretty much just point and click, so no tricky key combinations to figure out – any difficulty is just about the puzzles themselves!

In ‘Unsolved Case’ we return to the partnership of Ally and Old Dog, who have just received a mysterious briefcase each in their own apartments. These apartments happen to be fairly similar, and hold all the clues needed to crack the case open…

 

 

The Puzzles

All the puzzles in this game require cooperation, not just one or two. However, they’re also unique and creative in the way they require this teamwork. Certain puzzles may require you to do the same thing, with different results, while others require the sharing the information. One thing I noted as we played was how well-balanced these puzzles were – I never felt like I was missing out on the ‘aha’ moments, and similarly didn’t feel I was encountering them all. If there was ever a puzzle where I felt my mum was having all the fun, there was soon to be a similar puzzle where the role was reversed (although different enough that it wasn’t a cut-and-paste).

example with minor spoiler

At one point there is a puzzle that required my mum to essentially work out a maze (I think), and all I did was click a button to go left, right or forward. However, there was also a similar puzzle where I had to figure out which ‘doors’ to open or close and all my mum had to do was click a button with specific colours on. It’s a great example of balancing the gameplay with similar experiences, without it feeling identical.

 

 

In fact, I thought a lot of the puzzles were really well done – they were all creative while still being logical, if not too simple. At each stage, there is a padlock to unlock the next part of the story, with icons clearly showing which puzzles to solve to find the numbers. This meant we knew what we were doing and worked our way through each, even directly affecting each other’s rooms while doing so, which was a really fun.

 

 

The Verdict

I really enjoyed playing this – the playability was easy, puzzles were fun and interesting and it’s got a neat, comic book style. It’s a shame it was so short, but as it’s free I think this is a minor point! I would also say it would’ve been nice if there were slightly more independent puzzles too, to make it slightly less linear and bring a little more freedom. Overall though this is a really fun game to play, especially if your teammate is long distance, and I can’t wait to play the full game when it’s released soon!

Unsolved Case is free to play, and available on Steam, Android or iOS.

 

Detective Mimo | Review

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Detective Mimo Review | There is a bright shining City hidden in the Kingdom of CAT called Shrimp, an amazing place with luxurious facilities such as Cat Beauty Salon, fish café and MEW Bank. Shrimp attracts thieves from whole country. The most mysterious and rich palace called MEW bank is the prime target. One day, a renowned thief proclaimed that he would invade the bank and loot all the gold. Shrimp needs detective Mimo, a policecat who has guarded the city bravely to stop the crime! After conquering obstacles and solving puzzles, Mimo finally met the thief, but, to her surprise, the thief told her another story that will change Mimo’s life forever.

Developer: Omescape
Date Played: May 7th 2022
Console: Mobile
Number of Players: 1
Time Taken: ~2 hours

When Detective Mimo first came out, I immediately downloaded it onto my phone.

That was around a year ago, and every single day I opened up my games folder (usually to play through the Rusty Lake series, or more recently the Escape Games with their adorable clay-motion style), the masked Cat Thief would be staring up at me egging me on to open up the game.

I knew that Detective Mimo would be one of those games that would become all-encompassing and all-consuming. I’d also heard on the grapevine that it required some outside the box mobile phone mechanics such as plugging your phone in to trigger an action, spinning and rotating the physical device and so on. A game like that couldn’t just be picked up and put down at will in a doctor’s waiting room. Nope, I wanted to sit down and give it my full and individed attention.

That day came on a Saturday morning spent cooped up at home as I waited for my occasional Player 2 to get ready to go out. I had a couple of hours and felt like immersing myself in a puzzle filled world of detectives… And cats!

 

 

Everyone’s Favourite Policecat, Detective Mimo

Detective Mimo is an impossibly brilliant game to try to explain. If I had to distill the essence of the experience down to just one sentence… I couldn’t. So here’s the long version:

Detective Mimo is a classic mobile point-and-click escape room adventure with some major twists. Players play as Detective Mimo herself, a cat detective on the case to track down and foil the mysterious Cat Thief’s plans to rob the city bank. If you’ve played any puzzle adventure games you’ll probably know the drill – look for items, solve puzzles, give items to characters, combine items, advance the game and so on and so on. But I’m not giving it the “Wow Award” for being extra innovative for this.

Nope, it’s what happens next that is the star of the show. Without going into too many spoilers, a point in the game comes when the player must start all over again. I suppose it’s not too much of a spoiler to admit since this is the part of the game the company’s marketing focuses on the most, for example, in the trailer. But rest assured that this 50% point is when things start to get really, really weird.

Fourth Wall?! What Fourth Wall?

The first part of the game is really just a precursor to the second part of the game, the point from which the fourth wall is broken and the whole essence of “what even is a game” and “what are we doing here” is cracked wide open. From this point, players find themselves dismantling the video game from the inside out, typing code, command strings, sneaking around hidden menus.

The game developers take full advantage of the medium too. The point-and-click style of gameplay becomes redundant at a point, this time you need to really think outside of the box and figure out what your mobile phone device can do. At times I was holding my phone in the weirdest angles, spinning it around on a table, rummaging around looking for my charger to plug it in, and even using the torch light on the back of it to help solve puzzles.

It was a brilliantly wild ride.

 

 

*Miow*

But it’s not all about the puzzles and the quirky gameplay, Detective Mimo is an all round solid game when it comes to the details too. From a lovely, hand-illustrated style of world complete with a whole host of feline characters, to a fun (and often very dramatic) sound track that had my partner asking several times what on Earth I was doing on my phone.

The narrative design is some of the best I’ve seen in any video game for a very long time, and with exciting character arcs condensed into such a short and snappy game, I was hooked from the very first second to the very last.

In fact, I only needed to take one break – at some point my partner was ready to go out and off we went and enjoyed a day of eating nice food and walking around – but the whole time I couldn’t shake that itch of wanting to get back home so I could find out what happened to Detective Mimo. Was she okay in my phone without me? Could I sneak a glance during a bathroom break? This game has that effect on you, and it’s powerful.

As a final note on this game’s extra-gameplay perks, there is a secret level which might just be my favourite puzzle sequence in any game ever. This to say, it’s worth investigating, if you can.

 

 

The Verdict

Detective Mimo, for all it’s charm, has shot up to my personal gold tier of “must play” escape room video games and I’m floored that it isn’t more popular and well known within this community. If you only download one more game on your mobile device ever, make sure it’s this one. My best advice? Don’t be like me and wait a whole 10 months from downloading it to actually playing it – carve out an hour or two and play it right away! I promise you.

With such an impressive game from the Omescape Games team, I just hope they’ll work on another one. A sequel perhaps? I’d love to see more from Detective Mimo and her nemeses. Or perhaps an alternate reality detective genre set in the canine kingdom instead?

Whatever it’ll be, I’m eagerly awaiting returning to the fantastically brilliant puzzle game worlds this company creates.

 

Detective Mimo can be played on all mobile devices. Head to the website to download it here.

Doors: Paradox | Review

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Doors: Paradox | Review | For as long as we can remember we’ve been walking on the thin edge between chaos and order. Until one day a mysterious portal was opened and chaos prevailed. Now it’s up to you to bring back order…but it is not that simple!

Developer: Snapbreak Games
Console Played On: Mobile
Time Taken: 3 Hours
Difficulty: Easy
Number Of Players: 1

Doors: Paradox had no business being this good of a game! And of course, I mean that in the Gen-Z way of saying “damn, this game was brilliant”.

For a few months now I’ve not really had any mobiles games to get me excited. Usually I’ve got a couple on the go, and besides one game from about a decade ago which I have to use an emulator for, my ‘game’ folder on my phone has been severely lacking!

Then along came Doors: Paradox, with it’s intriguing trailer, bright poppy graphics, and mysterious undercurrent of a story. Oooh… Tell me more!

Chaos and Order

In Doors Paradox, vast space with a floating island in front of you. Each island is built around a door, but piled high with puzzles to solve before that door will open. You can rotate your camera around the island and tap into almost anything for a closer look, all while collecting objects and combining curious things to reach a puzzle’s solution.

It sounds simple, but the reason why introduces an arcing narrative of chaos and order told through the medium of small scrolls hidden in each level, and a mysterious black cat who beckons you into each doorway and transports you to a new world. It’s a tale as old as time: Chaos versus Order, and somehow your presence in this dimension, following the cat and solving puzzles, will save everyone. At the end of the game you’re presented with a choice and a powerful final puzzle to solve. I have no idea if I made the right choices, but I had a lot of fun doing them.

Doors: Paradox

Puzzlescapes and Floating Islands

I suspend my disbelief on the story, because Doors: Paradox’s strength isn’t really in the narrative, it’s in the puzzlescapes each level presents. Escape room enthusiasts will be familiar with some of the themes – there’s a pirate episode, a haunted house episode, a cyberpunk style episode – even some strong steampunk elements running all the way through. But the developers manage to inject a feeling of freshness to each world they create to create visually impressive graphics and a brilliant soundtrack to boot.

Each of these little worlds is a whole escape room in of itself. You can expect about 5 – 10 minutes of gameplay for each, with a few stand out levels which really got my brain cogs whirring to solve. There’s a huge mix of puzzles in this game and the feel of each new world is so unique that each time I picked up my phone (whilst waiting for the bus, or waiting for some pasta to cook) I felt a sense of familiarity and surprise at what the next level presented.

For sure, there were a few puzzles I recognised from other video games and escape room games, but that likely comes with the territory of their only being a finite number of types of puzzles out there. In particular there were a few I recognised from The Room series, and one or two from old platformers I grew up with. but then, there were also many I’d never seen before which were fantastic. Some stand outs include fixing a motorbike in a cyberpunk future world, casino slots, fighting a cat over a box of sushi and angling the sun’s rays to destroy a vampire.

The majority of the puzzles are solved by tapping your finger to find, combine and use objects, but occasionally a more complex puzzle presents itself where a series of rotating dials must be tweaked to the rigth angle, some reflex action as you fire objects through small spaces, or a classic connecting wires puzzle. In any case, the breadth of what types of puzzles you’ll encounter is vast, so expect to be kept on your toes!

As well as solving the puzzles, there are gemstones to collect and scrolls to discover if you wish to follow the narrative. These are offered as collectables, but play an important role as you’ll need the gemstones to unlock the final, Epilogue levels too.

An Immersive Atmosphere… In Your Pocket!

No review of Doors: Paradox would be complete without mentioning the sound. I almost never play mobile games with the volume up – mostly because I’m playing on the go, in public, or listening to something else in the background. But Doors: Paradox is one of those games worth taking the extra effort to listen as you play. From moody sound scapes to relaxing music and satisfying jingles when a correct answer is inputted… The developers have done a brilliant job in bringing their world’s to life with sound!

Combined with the graphics, this makes Doors: Paradox an unexpectedly relaxing game. Like watching an escape room themed “lofi beats” on repeat for hours on Youtube, Doors: Paradox manages to create a perfect zen atmosphere. The puzzles can be tricky, but there’s nothing taxing in this game. It’s more about your journey through the worlds.

Of course, if you get stuck you can skip a puzzle with no detriment to the game at all – another nod to the fact the developers want you to really take your time and enjoy yourself here.

The Verdict

The first 8 levels in Doors: Paradox are free, after which you can pay a small amount to upgrade to the full game. For me, it’s well worth upgrading. If you enjoy the first 8 levels, then the whole game offers more of the same (and then some).

I personally really enjoyed playing it, and if I had just one criticism it would be that there isn’t more of it. I could have played 100 more levels and wouldn’t have been bored for a single moment. If you’re looking for a visually gorgeous, ‘pick up and play’ any time style mobile game that scratches that escape room itch, look no further.

If you want to play Doors: Paradox for yourself, download it for free on the Google Play Store or Apple Store here.