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Family Fun With Fairytale Hidden Objects
A review of: The Mystery of Whiterock Castle by: L. Harrison
Platform: WiiWare | Publisher: RTL Interactive
Rating: 6.5/10
The Mystery of Whiterock Castle came out on WiiWare last month, with a cost of 700 Wii Points. The Mystery of Whiterock Castle is a hidden object game. You are cast in the role of a young nave who is visiting a princess. When you reach her bedchambers, you find that she has gone missing, so you must look for her.
Each level is a place in the castle – you start out tidying the missing princess' room, then you look around the castle and are tasked with finding items for various residents such as the blacksmith, the cook, and the gardener.
Hidden object games have been popular on the PC for many years, and they're the kind of game you either love or hate. The question is, how has the game transferred to the Wii?
In my opinion the developers have done a decent job. The game has three modes – Single Player, Co-Operative, and Competitive. The modes are pretty much self explanatory – you have in Single Player, you work through the levels by yourself. In Co-Operative, you work with a friend to find all the items in each level, and in Competitive, you're racing against a friend to see who can find the items the fastest.
Each level is designed to look like a part of the castle. You have to find a set number of items in each room. In the princess's room, you could be looking for marbles, or books, for example. In the blacksmith's room you're looking for daggers or horseshoes. You have a set period of time to find all of the items, and you score points for each one you find. You lose points if you click on something that isn't one of the items you're looking for.
For added challenge, some of the items could be hidden inside something – a box, or a closet, for example. It's easy to tell when something opens, though. For even more challenge, you have to worry about light, some levels are darker than others, so you have to pan your “torch” over the level to reveal a small spotlit area. There's also a magnifying glass that you can use to zoom in on the area under your cursor.
There are two difficulties – Easy and Hard. The differences between the difficulties are the number of items you have to find, the time you have to find them, and the scoring penalty for clicking on something that isn't one of the objects you're trying to find.
Hidden Object games have been popular on the PC for a long time, but how well has this one translated to the Wii? Well, in my opinion, it's translated fairly well. It can be frustrating at times – the objects are designed to blend in to the scenery, so they don't always stand out – especially when you're looking for, say, something yellow in a predominantly yellow scene. The lower resolution of the Wii compared to a PC screen makes it irritating to focus on the small details in the game. That complaint aside, the rest of the game has moved over well.
The 'cursor' is a chunky wooden sword, and to compensate for the imprecise nature of the Wii Remote you don't have to be very precise with our aim, there's quite a large area around the sword's tip that is counted when you click. It's not big enough to let you cheat, but it's big enough to remove any frustrations.
The music is decent, and the levels are nicely designed. If you fail to find all the items in a level, you have to go back to the start and play through again, but the items that you have to find on each level are randomized, so it doesn't feel repetitive. I would have liked to have the ability to re-try a level without going back to the start (perhaps without it counting for the highscores), but I can understand why they didn't allow that. There are ten levels, and if you're a fan of hidden object games I could imagine the randomization would allow for plenty of replay value, since there are lots of different items for you to find. I do think that some items are much easier to spot than others, so there's a massive element of luck in the high score tables, but that's not uncommon for Hidden Object games.
I think that veterans of the genre might find it a little easy, but casual players, and younger players, will probably enjoy the game. The story is pretty light, but the art style is good, and some of the characters made me smile. Hardcore gamers would probably buzz through the levels in one sitting and be bored with it, but if you want to introduce a younger family member to games, then the co-op mode would make for some family fun, and the competitive mode will entertain slightly older siblings for quite a while.
Overall, I think the developers have hit their target audience dead on, and 700 Wii points is a good price the game. If you're a hidden object fan or looking for something for younger gamers, give it a look.
