The Mystery of the Mummy

The Good
When a famous Egyptologist goes missing it’s up to Sherlock Holmes (minus Watson) to uncover the mystery of his presumed death. Does Holmes collect clues and talk to suspects? No, he explores a mansion and solves puzzles for a few hours.

The Mystery of the Mummy plays like a first generation Myst clone. Holmes’ exploration of the mansion is broken into five Acts and takes him into such varied locations as the library, the hallway and the wine cellar. Navigation through the mansion is accomplished by pointing-and-clicking on hotspots. The cursor changes to allow you to investigate certain areas closer or to indicate if something from your inventory is required.

The best element of the interface is that you can look all around the room from where you are standing. This alleviates the pains of having to click just to turn around and means that it’s important to pay attention to features of the floor and ceiling.

Most of the puzzles are pretty good. Within the context of a paranoid person protecting his house, the use of sliders to open doors makes sense. Other puzzles don’t work that well.

Holmes occasionally makes comments about rooms or specific items and these comments are stored in a journal. He also keeps a scrapbook containing useful news items, letters and other documents you might stumble across.

The Bad
While reports of the demise of the adventure genre are highly exaggerated, this game is DOA. As I said, this game is a first generation Myst clone. It plays almost exactly like Shivers, except Shivers had a more interesting story.

Graphically, this game isn’t just dated, it’s carbon dated: 1993 not 2003. Just try to make out the item on the stairs from the screen shots. To successfully complete the game, you’ll need to wave the mouse over every single pixel. Also the color palette is so limited it’s nearly impossible to see a brown paintbrush on a brown barrel or a gray rag on a gray floor.

While some puzzles are well incorporated into the game, some are absolutely terrible. The solution of one puzzle reveals Holmes’ profile. Where’s the logic in that? A sphinx I could understand, but a consulting detective? Other puzzles involve combining inventory items with each other. This usually doesn’t make sense, so you’ll have to try combining everything until for some reason you can tie rope around an axe. Likewise, you’ll have to try every inventory item on everything puzzle in the house. What do I stick this fork in? What should I attach to the fan? If you come across a Rube Goldberg bomb, you’ll have to construct another Rube Goldberg device to disarm it.

Holmes is little to no help and keeps reminding the player that it is a game: “We should do this…” Thanks for killing any suspension of disbelief. He makes comments that are either extremely obvious or ones that display some level of precognition. Standing in a library Holmes says, “He has a lot of books. He must have had a lot of time to read.” No sh*t Sherlock. Then Holmes will tell you when you click on a door, “We won’t find anything useful in there.” We won’t?

This game is a complete mess. I cannot recommend this game on any level.

The Case of the Rose Tattoo, The Riddle of the Crown Jewels, Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective or 221b Baker Street are all superior to this title.

The Bottom Line
The only mystery here is how this title got published.