Mystery Mania
Mystery Mania is a mixture of Lucasfilm-style adventure game and puzzle game, featuring a lonely robot called F8 who has woken up in a strange manor while suffering a severe case of amnesia. This game was developed by Progressive Media, the same people who did the highly-acclaimed Sola Rola.
How To Get It:
You can download Mystery Mania from Ovi Store by selecting your phone's Ovi Store icon, or by going to store.ovi.mobi on your phone's web browser.
Alternatively you can go to store.ovi.com on your computer's browser.
If you can't see the game displayed on Ovi Store, it probably isn't compatible with your phone model.
For more info about using Ovi Store, see our Unofficial Ovi Store FAQ page.
Ovi Gaming Review:
Phone Used For Review - Nokia 5800 XpressMusic (games may be different on different phone models)
Gameplay - Mystery Mania is a mixture of puzzles and adventure gaming, indeed it largely follows the format of the 1980s BBC television programme "The Adventure Game": you enter a locked room, there's a collection of objects in it, and you have to work out how to use them to escape to the next room where there's a harder puzzle. There's also a strong plot driving the whole thing, which concerns a robot called F8 who wakes up in a strange castle with no memory of how he got there or who he is. This is a gamer-friendly adventure, so you cannot die though you may need to restart some puzzles if you destroy an object you need for the solution. On touchscreen devices the interface consists of touching the object you want to use and a green circle will appear to acknowledge the action (objects which cannot be used will produce red circles).
Graphics - Rather unusually for a phone game, Mystery Mania uses vector graphics instead of bitmap, which produces a simpler look but allows characters to smoothly change size and shape. It looks a bit clunky in the screenshots but if you watch the video you should see that it works pretty well in action as it allows the game more flexibility over what happens to the characters. The robot F8 is frequently dropped, shrunk, electrocuted etc and all these animations work better because of the vector graphics. Note that on the Nokia 5800 this game will only work in horizontal/landscape mode.
Sound - There's a creepy MIDI soundtrack with the occasional sampled effect. It sounds very similar to a Lucasfilm or Sierra adventure of the 1980s/90s, which should please fans of the genre.
Multiplayer & Online - None, and to be fair this game genre doesn't suit online or multiplayer anyway.
TV Out - Mystery Mania looks nice on a television set, the 2D graphics work well. As always, if you're playing on a touchscreen device you may not be able to watch the TV screen while playing as you'll need to constantly look down at your device to see where your finger or stylus is.
Overall - Mystery Mania is a very nice little adventure/puzzle game which is original and quite charming. Despite the robots and horror music the actual plot is nicely understated, there are no monsters taking over the world or aliens shooting each other, and it feels a lot like a children's story which suits the graphical style very well. The puzzles are far too easy at the beginning of the game, though they get trickier as you progress and there are dozens of rooms in the castle so you should get a fair amount of gameplay out of this. The downside to all adventure games is that once you've solved the puzzles and watched the plot unfold, there's absolutely no replay value whatsoever. However, at 5 euros that probably doesn't matter, what is here is good fun.
Score - 83%
Ovi Gaming Video:
Ovi Gaming Screenshots (taken on the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic - games may look different on different phone models):
