Crowded Mysteries

Genre: Puzzle

Players: 1

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Review:

Crowded Mysteries is a “find the hidden object”-style Puzzle game released on the Nintendo Switch in 2023 and ported to PC in 2024. In this game, players are presented with a large scrollable isometric-view static perspective of a section of a city, and are tasked with “solving crimes” by finding specific crimes that happened within this part of the city, tracking down the series of events that happened, and then finding the culprit.

These scenes are depicted at first with simple cartoony black and white line drawings, backed by a stereotypical “detective”-style instrumental soundtrack, with the drawings coloring in as you discover each link in the chain of the individual mysteries you’re looking into.

To track events back in time, the game shows characters who moved at multiple points in the series of events, and often “solving” crimes comes down to finding the person or thing you’re looking for, then trying to spot where they were a few minutes before that, then a few minutes before that. There’s a lot of guesswork involved here, as it’s not always clear what path a character took, and sometimes you’ll have to resort to just looking over the entire area rather than trying to spot the specific path someone took.

This task is made even more difficult by the game’s monochrome visuals, which make it that much harder to spot the specific character you’re looking for among a cityscape full of somewhat similar-looking cartoony characters. Also, I was frustrated when I spotted other crimes that would clearly be pertinent later, but wasn’t given any way to point them out or mark them because the game’s story decided that I hadn’t gotten to that point yet, meaning I would have to “re-discover” it again later.

Finally, a more minor complaint, and it starts with something this game does well – it has a delightfully innocent cartoony charm that really comes through with the characters, with the conversations involving the game’s police character’s “interrogation” of suspects being one of the more enjoyable parts of the game. My complaint about this is that this would have been a perfectly fine family-friendly game if it toned down the violence a bit and dropped a reference to what is pretty clearly implied to be an in-universe pornographic film (though as far as I could tell, there’s no actual nudity in the game itself). While neither of these things make this game worse, they do limit the potential target audience for the game.

In the end, I really liked the idea of Crowded Mysteries, but found the execution to be lacking. It’s delightful to think of a “Where’s Waldo”-style “find the hidden object” game where you’re tracking down crimes, but the way the game does this makes it needlessly difficult to find what you’re looking for, and refuses to let you mark crimes you know you’ll be looking for later. I do think this game still makes a case for itself through its wonderful charm, but I can’t help but feel like a few tweaks could have made this game far better.

tl;dr – Crowded Mysteries is a Where’s Waldo-style “find the hidden object” Puzzle Game where players are tracking down events in the timeline of various crimes that happened in a section of a city. This game’s concept is great, and it has a wonderful charm to it, but the execution makes it harder to find what you’re looking for with its monochrome visuals, and doesn’t let you mark things you find that you know you’ll be looking for later. Overall, this is still an enjoyable game, but it feels like it could have been much better.

Grade: C+

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