Remember, there's always something cleverer than yourself.
The hero of this particular tale is a rotund wizard named Monty who must explore five castle's of mystery. Strangely for a wizard you have a total lack of magical abilities at you disposal. But being tasked as the game's hero you must still tackle each castle's tyrannical baron and rid them of their throne. To accomplish you're task you must solve all one hundred and eighty puzzle rooms. And sticking to the formula like glue each puzzle becomes increasingly more difficult.
All you need to know about the plot has been explained above. The game cares very little about it during gameplay. The interaction between the game's many characters and yourself is very funny at times though and borders on humiliation as NPC’s harass and berate you and that's coming from the people your helping. If your a fan of fat jokes you'll be in you're element here because the majority of insults are directed at our heroes expanding waistline. And it's something that reminded me of my time spent playing point and click adventure games many moons ago.
The end goal of the one hundred and eighty levels is to collect five specific objects from each castle as you play through each level. To accomplish this talk you must negotiate dungeons filled with lava, ghosts, golems and deadly pits. To help you navigate each level there are various items that you can use to navigate to the levels exit. Sounds simple, right? Well you're wrong. There is a substantial challenge here and it's not for those who give us easy.
As you progress through each castle new powers and hazards are presented. You enter one castle and suddenly there will be paths covered in ice that will make you slide if you dare to step on them or a new power gives you the ability to take over the body of an enemy and control him. Some solutions will appear very easily but others are real head scratchers. Some levels require you to beat a time limit and there were my least favourite. Rushing through a level when your on the clock just becomes a mad rush of trial and error and it spoilt the slow pace of the game because to truly enjoy Mystery Castle at its best it should be played at a sedate speed to fully enjoy the experience.
Graphically there is not a lot to shout about but puzzles games have never been about looks. Still it's a shame that they couldn't have added a few bells and whistles considering that this is a port of an already well 
established Android game. The levels just look very dull and in terms of design. The colour are bright and cheery but each room soon begins to look exactly like the last one. The music is completely forgettable and unusually for a game with quite of lot of character interaction there is no voice acting which would have helped lighten the mood.
Mystery Castle sets its stall out very early on and doesn't feel the need to add any surprises. It sticks to its old school roots and does a good job of capturing that classic feeling. The levels do before very hit and miss especially the timed levels but overall you could do worse then immerse yourself in a rotund wizard's shoes for a few hours.
Publisher: Runestone Games
Developer: Runestone Games
Modes: Single Player
Mystery Castle is available now for £7.99
Review code supplied by XCN