For this critical play, I decided to play Tiny Room: Town Mystery by Kiary Games, which is a mobile mystery game rated for ages 4 and up on App Store. The gameplay’s puzzles and investigations of rooms was enough to maintain my attention and interest, but I feel that the game’s proposed narrative is not greatly woven into most of them. Simply, most of the puzzles feel arbitrary.
What is the Narrative? How is it Organized?
This game’s premise is built upon an embedded narrative, where the player character is prompted to investigate it from an urgent letter from their father. This story is organized into acts based on narrative change, which are organized into chapters. Each chapter is a separate location. These are the game’s levels. The completion of each level has a narrative explanation that leads to the next location (i.e you find a bank storage key, so you go to the bank next), so this game depends heavily upon space to tells its story. To further emphasize this, the animation that plays whenever a level is completed is a map being redirected to the next location (the next level). Since there are no NPCs to even interact with, space is the only way to learn the story. Each location uncovers more about the mysterious crystal that led to the townspeople and your father’s disappearance.
What is the Gameplay Like? Does it serve the Narrative?
The primary motivation for playing for most of the time is the purpose of exploration. The base mechanic of locking rooms behind puzzles–many of which require exploration of other areas for key items or clues–creates a dynamic of searching everything because there’s that base desire of curiosity, and upon completion, the aesthetic of exploration. As a 3D modeled game, Tiny Room: Town Mystery takes this further since you can rotate the rooms to explore the entire space, and it’s often necessary to do so to advance the game since clues and items are often around the corner. You automatically maintain an inventory for key items and notes (clues for puzzles). Generally speaking, unlocking a new area of the level naturally unlocks the next. There was little to no mechanical snags in the game’s function as a mystery puzzle game.
However, there were rarely moments where I felt that the embedded narrative worked in conjunction with the puzzles. At worst, the puzzles and gameplay actually hindered the story. Most of the puzzles’ solutions are completely superficial to the overarching story. There are numerous passwords where the solution is simply a code based on another area in the level. These work fine on a gameplay level since it rewards exploration, but narratively speaking, it doesn’t do anything. All they exist as are obstacles for the level’s overall conclusion. There are some notes that you read and areas that provide intrigue that are for the embedded narrative such as the church’s hidden passageway or your father’s emails, but these are quite sparse. In fact the sheer abundance of the puzzles can feel contradictory to the story, why would an secret operation leave a trail of openings? There are some cute nods to the fact that workers have left puzzles for the next worker (i.e. the convenience store), but we never meet these workers either, and they’re mostly irrelevant to the greater plot. In fact, there are many moments where the game feels like you should be able to investigate a set piece, but you’re ultimately not. For instance, there is a map of the town in the convenience store after the crystal affects the dimension, BUT you cannot investigate this map to see if this affected the world. Or there’s a mysterious car in the forest, which you never learn more about.
The only moments where narrative is married to mechanics, is when the player character’s relationship to the father is relevant as a clue to the puzzle such as flickering the lights in your bedroom to reveal a code.
Accessibility of Gameplay
Furthermore, the accessibility of the gameplay is questionable. There are no visibility options for impaired vision or colorblindness. There is an inventory system for notes and items, which is nice. However, a lot of relevant info is not included in notes and can be easily forgotten for someone with a low attention span (I have ADHD myself). The hint system supplements this well though.
Conclusions
Tiny Room: Town Mystery works well as a mystery game mechanically. On a narrative level, most of the gameplay is irrelevant to the story. The story acts more like set dressing. I wonder if this is because the devs wanted to space out the game to be over a certain length, and so, the story becomes full of filler puzzles. In short, this game is more focused on mechanics than story.
