Department 42: The Mystery of the Nine Reviews

This is a challenging review to write. The game is old and the presentation here seems to lack some modernization you might expect. I think this makes the game appear worse than it would have been when it released. It's absolutely playable, but can also be challenging is odd ways. First of all, the story. I didn't have an issue with it. The game is essentially multiple small "cases" to recover a certain artifact. I liked how the different cases were broken up and had a lot of variety to them, even if they were each pretty small. I understand that many of these games are lower budget, and usually this is just fine if not charming, but the game lacked animated cutscenes for the most part and often would use a screen with a portrait and text to move you from one case to the next. There is I think an intro cutscene and one at the game's end, but not really anywhere else that I remember. Each case has a short intro with text that displays over images, and the text fades in and out so you can miss it if you're not paying attention. But these parts aren't even narrated, so there's not a lot of dialog or voice acting either, also unlike many other of these kinds of games I play. The first couple of cases have the most to do in them in my opinion and each case gets slightly shorter like they're trying to quickly rap the whole story up at the end. Most of the cases are each about 2-3 scenes each. I liked going back and picking new items out of each hidden object scene and solving all of the puzzles that are all queued up on those screens to reveal new things and having a specific area to dig into instead of running around all over the place, but there isn't a ton of steps in these cases, usually you're hitting a hidden object area on each scene twice or so, solving a puzzle or two, and then moving on. This is a benefit for getting stuck, you only have usually 2 scenes to investigate to progress, but it just doesn't feel very substantial towards the end. The hidden object scenes were really hit or miss and I think are one of the things that was probably better before but is worse on modern screens. Many objects are partially hidden or just well-placed in a crowded spot and are no trouble, but some were camouflaged like a shape or pattern that is the same color or pattern as something behind it and these were awful to find. The color and size of them made a lot of them so hard to spot that even after using the hint feature I still didn't see what it was indicating. I'm sure when screen resolutions were lower these would be easier to spot, or that colors not on an LCD or LED monitor maybe looked easier to see differences of. But contemporarily, there were some so hard to find I felt like they would be impossible without hints. The other thing this game doesn't have going for it is the detection for clicking on a hidden object item is pixel-perfect and if you're off by even a single pixel you'll miss. I had items I was sure were the object I was looking for but after clicking them 3 or 4 times I would give up thinking I was wrong. However, when I finally used the hint to find that last item, it would end up indicating the item I thought it was, but I just didn't click in the exact correct spot to pick up. Even things like drawings or shapes that are an outline that's empty in the center would sometimes not be selected if you clicked on the transparent center and not the specific drawing line. Again, maybe not as big of an issue on smaller resolutions, but it's incredibly difficult to navigate on larger screens. The puzzles I also really did not like. A few were OK, but mostly the issues I had were 2 things: 1) many were confusingly set up so you would never understand how to solve them without reading instructions. I think that good puzzles shouldn't need a detailed explanation. They didn't make good use of game concepts that people would already know how to interact with intuitively. 2) some were completely random and had no skill involved. A few of them are games of chance like dice, and there was no strategy because it was random-- sometimes you would roll and get low points every time and lose, and you just needed to keep trying over and over until you just happened to score higher rolls. I find these kinds of fake puzzles frustrating when I am playing a game like this to test my mettle and have some challenges to think through. There were a few songs they use throughout the game, not a ton of music variety, but it worked. I played this on Surface Go tablet and I also found touch input didn't work correctly no matter what compatibility I tried (it wasn't accurate, would always be a few inches up and to the left of where I touch the screen), so like I said, just many issues related to the age of game. Maybe not as bad if you had played it on earlier computers. Wish they had modernized it a little before release on Steam. But it is playable, I did beat the game, so not enough technical issues to make it truly "unplayable" I would say, just frustrating at times. There are no achievements at least, so you can use hint or skip to your hearts content, and in a weird way it did feel fun to get to use those features for once without ruining an achievement. I think that if you read this you probably know enough to decide for yourself if you'd like this game or not, but I can't recommend it when so many other hidden object games exist that are more compatible and easier to play on Steam. If you do decide to play it, I strongly recommend doing this on a desktop computer with a mouse, you may even consider trying to adjust your screen resolution or zoom when playing so you can get a better look at the hidden object scenes.