Mystic Diary: Haunted Island

The Good
The game installed and ran flawlessly under Windows 10 in both full screen and windowed modes. There's a good range of puzzles and all of them could be skipped. Everything else was OK with neither the music, the artwork or the story being especially outstanding.

The Bad
No major issues with this game, just a few minor observations.

I have this game as part of a two game compilation. The first game of the series installed as a freestanding game but this game installed as an entry in the Big Fish Games manager. Not really a problem but it may be a bit disconcerting to some.

The game starts in a magician's cottage and later moves to the haunted island. After solving many puzzles in the cottage the time comes to assemble the magician's balloon and head off to the eponymous island. I gathered various missing parts and assembled the balloon mainly to see what had yet to be found and was surprised when the balloon took off because I still had some cottagey items in my inventory and I was leaving unsolved puzzles behind. Later in the game it was possible to return to the cottage so all was as it should have been but at the time I was anticipating running into a dead end at some point. A line or two of dialogue confirming all was well would have been appreciated.

The last puzzle in the game is a 'Simon Says' type of musical sequence puzzle, I think I did three or four rounds of this and reached a point where I was faced with an eight note sequence with more to follow when I chose to skip the puzzle. Once I'd skipped the puzzle there was a very short sequence that ended the game, so short that I missed it, and there was no way to view it again without replaying the entire game.

The Bottom Line
Another hidden object game which, like the first game in the series, is pretty standard for the genre and therefore doesn't really do anything wrong yet doesn't manage to stand out from the crowd either.

The puzzles are good but not impossible, the artwork is OK, and the game was fun to play but for me there's no replay value and nothing that makes this game memorable.

Time to complete: three and a half hours.