This week, I played Tiny Room Story: Town Mystery, a point-and-click mystery game developed and published by Kiary Games. The game is available on PC and mobile, and I played through Chapter 2 on mobile. Rated for players age nine and above, it is aimed toward a somewhat experienced puzzle game audience. The story follows a detective who arrives in the abandoned town of Redcliff after receiving a letter from his father. The game weaves this mystery into its mechanics by encouraging the player to explore narratively-led levels to find evidence and make connections between places and items.
The tutorial level establishes the game’s core mechanics with only a minimal glimpse into the story. The road into Redcliff is blocked, requiring the player to access a control building, restore its power, and raise the road barrier. Even with it being a tutorial meant to teach the player how to effectively explore the game’s environments to solve puzzles, this level already shows how puzzles directly tie into narrative progression. Instead of being given a drawn-out cutscene or written explanation, the player is put straight into solving puzzles. This way, the player can begin experiencing and building their own mindmap of the narrative at hand while also being introduced to their main mode of doing so.
Chapter 1 expands this idea by introducing the father’s house. The player continues to solve increasingly complex puzzles, discovering hidden rooms and new clues as to the father’s actions. I especially enjoyed the fact that the game allows you to interact with most objects, even if the interaction does not provide you with any clues or information. This not only ups the challenge of the puzzle but also makes the world more engaging to explore, prompting the player to continue to be curious. I also appreciate the fact that the game does not interrupt the game by adding any unnecessary rewards for completing puzzles. This again greatly helps immersion, with both the detective and the player only focused on solving these puzzles in wanting to discover the whereabouts of the father. Through interactions with these various items, the embedded narrative of the father’s disappearance becomes clearer with each puzzle solved.
With the question for this week being the same as the last, it makes sense to compare Tiny Room Story: Town Mystery and Monument Valley. Both games use their puzzles to progress their narratives, but differ in their approaches. Monument Valley takes a more laid-back approach, focusing more on aesthetics than puzzle complexity. This allows it to be more narratively expressive and accessible to a less experienced audience. On the other hand, Town Mystery goes for a more complex puzzle scheme and focuses on a detective-style of storytelling. While in Monument Valley you feel like you are freely exploring a slowly unraveling world, in Town Mystery you are more concerned with how the current puzzles lead to the next, and how your discoveries apply to the overarching story.
Regarding accessibility, a barrier seen in Town Mystery is its vast amount of information to remember. By Chapter 2, players need to keep track of collected items, codes, and other information. While the inventory and notes sections provide an in-game way to sort this, this may not be enough for all players. While I could not find any accounts of explicitly disabled players, there are several reviews that shared the sentiment of being overwhelmed by the complexity of some puzzles. To help mitigate this, the game could potentially include a notebook or some other way for players to keep track of their own notes. This way, the player has more say in how they can use the information provided to them.
Another detail I found interesting was how the game chose to assign the main character a portrait and mention of being a son, but not any other identifying information. The designers chose to make the protagonist a white male, even though no other information, such as a name, points to this specific identity. From a standpoint of diversity, it would make more sense to not include the portrait and allow the player to imagine their own protagonist. Going even further, the designers could have included a simple character creation menu to allow the player to express themselves in a more tangible way. While the current implementation does not affect the overall story, it is important to consider your broader audience and how they can connect with your game and narrative.
