Mystic Diary: Lost Brother
Description official description
A 19th century magician starts searching for his brother after losing contact with him, embarking on a quest around the world to exotic and isolated places of the globe.
Mystic Diary: Lost Brother is an adventure and hidden object game with simple puzzles tailored for the casual market. The game moves from location to location, presented as a single and mostly static screen, with the plot being developed and told through short introductions on open books and monochromatic sketches between the scenes. The initial goal of each chapter is to collect and store a series of objects inside the inventory slots at the bottom, from where they can be dragged and dropped on the appropriate and logical parts of the scenery to solve puzzles. The cursor turns into a magnifying glass when hovering over one of the necessary objects. The stored inventory objects can be combined to create new items. The interactive parts of the screen sparkle to indicate their presence and help the player find them.
A window containing a separate mini-game appears after clicking on certain hotspots. Some are hidden object challenges, where the objective is to find and click on the items shown as gray images on a list at the bottom. Others are mechanisms and puzzles that have to be manipulated directly with the mouse to be solved.
After finishing the adventure portion of the scene, the player has to search and find all the items from a list of objects replacing the inventory at the bottom. The hint button shows the exact position of one of the required objects. At the end of each chapter, the player has to drag a giant magnifier cursor all over the screen to uncover a fiery magical symbol.
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Credits (Windows version)
5 People
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Reviews
Critics
Average score: 70% (based on 1 ratings)
Players
Average score: 2.8 out of 5 (based on 1 ratings)
Short, nicely done, nothing special though
The Good
The game installed on Windows 10 with no problems and ran flawlessly in full screen mode.
This is a pretty standard hidden object game. It has the usual sparkly areas to show the player where to look for a hidden object scene and a magic magnifying glass to locate puzzle solving objects in the wider scene. The game has a series of tutorial messages that appear in the beginning of the game, these cannot be toggled on/off nor can they be skipped, however they are not intrusive and they soon go away.
The artwork is good but not photorealistic. There are both sound effects and music, they worked well with the game but were neither outstanding nor memorable so I played the game while listening to the radio. There is no voice acting.
There is a decent range of puzzles, and all of them can be skipped.
The Bad
Another decent game that follows where many have gone before, that means it doesn't do anything new but it also means it doesn't do anything wrong either. What I've listed below are minor quibbles that I noted along the way.
The hidden object scenes come in two basic kinds, one which shows a silhouette of the object and another which names the object. Both work well but non US players should remember that an eggplant is not a plant - it's an aubergine, and a pickle is a gherkin.
There is a skip function for the puzzles but for the other scenes there is only a hint function which shows the player either where to look or where something needs to be done. This did confuse me once, easily done I know, because the hint button just told me what I already knew. Eventually I realised that having the object I needed wasn't enough, it had to be combined with something else. Until the penny dropped I was stuck and the game's help system was of no use.
The Bottom Line
The game was completed in just under three hours. I did use the hint button two times which possibly shortened the play time but I also went AFK for a bit so three hours is a pretty accurate game length.
It's a solid, OK game that I'll have forgotten in a couple of days.
Windows · by piltdown_man (236159) · 2023
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Contributors to this Entry
Game added by Macs Black.
iPad added by Sciere. Linux added by Alaka.
Additional contributors: Alaka.
Game added July 8, 2009. Last modified February 22, 2023.