Review | Tiny Room Stories: Town Mystery

When a mobile game comes to PC, I’m usually very skeptical. A lot of mobile games just don’t seem to work on a computer, or they’re just not well enough adjusted. Tiny Rooms Stories: Town Mystery by Kiary Games is an example of a point and click puzzle / adventure game that has recently released on Steam. I was very curious to see if this little game managed to impress me, so I dove right into it!

We played Tiny Room Stories for 10 hours on PC.

What we liked!

• Challenging gameplay: There is a total of fifteen chapters that you need to go through. Each and every level is filled with tons of puzzles. The developers described the game as a combination of quests and escape rooms, and I definitely approve of this description. Now, the puzzles are a lot harder than I thought they’d be. Without the help of the walkthrough (and sometimes my boyfriend), I would have been stuck on some mysteries for hours, I think. I like that Tiny Room Stories offers very challenging gameplay because I’m sure every player will have to crack their brain.
• Walkthrough: As I mentioned above, the puzzle solving is not always easy. Luckily, the game offers a helping hand when needed. You can consult the walkthrough at any time during the gameplay. Apparently, a video was recorded and uploaded to YouTube for every chapter with all the solutions. So, if you get stuck, you click the ‘?’ button and it takes you right to the correct video. Honestly, without this walkthrough I probably wouldn’t have been able to finish the game. If you play this, you’ll see you’re going to need the walkthrough a lot more than you dare to admit. Bless the developers for providing this!
• Lots of variation: Not only are the puzzles very varied, so are the surroundings. Puzzles range from deciphering codes, which you will be doing a lot (without it getting tedious, though) to finding keys or ‘playing’ chess. The various environments you journey to are very fun too. You’ll never get bored of a location, simply because there are so many different ones. You go to your fathers house, but you’ll also dive into the sea and visit caves. The diversity in both puzzles and locations kept the game from becoming repetitive or boring.
• Graphics and sound: The graphics are fairly simple, but everything looks decent. You can look at your location from different angles, and often have to take a closer look at things. The artstyle isn’t really anything special, and felt mobile-like, but that didn’t bother me at all. Alongside the graphics, there’s of course the sound aspect. On the one hand, there are the sound effects. They’re there, and that it’s, and it’s enough. On the other hand, there’s a soothing soundtrack to accompany you on your trip throughout the game. I think a puzzle game that requires a lot of thinking really doesn’t need an explosive soundtrack to distract you, but benefits from some calming background music.
• Engaging story: Of course we want an intruiging story when we’re trying to solve puzzles. Nobody wants to solve puzzles in a game like this just for the sake of it. In Tiny Room Stories, you are a private detective who receives a letter from his father. You travel to Redcliff, a small town that appears to be completely empty. It’s up to you to find out what the hell happened to your father and everyone else in town. It’s an interesting story that offers a few plot twists along the way, and kept me invested in the game. I can only recommend puzzle game fans to discover the secrets of Redcliff!

Somewhere between

• Take a notepad: Sometimes, you get to take certain clues or pieces of paper along with you to the next room or space, but that’s not up to you. It’ll happen that you need to remember codes or other important things. Let me save you the trouble and suggest keeping a notepad or your phone nearby so you can write down or take pictures of things you need to remember. I had to do this more than once, and a warning in the beginning would’ve been nice.

What we disliked

• There’s absolutely nothing fundamentally wrong with this game!

CONCLUSION

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