Mystery Tales: Dealer’s Choices – Review

You and your friend have been invited to set sail on the Princess Lolita , a luxury casino cruise ship owned by William Gladstone. In Mystery Tales‘ fashion, your night quickly turns into a horrifying event when people on board are found murdered. Are there really ghost spirits on the cruise and can you find out the real culprit? Mystery Tales: Dealer’s Choices is the new hidden object adventure sequel from Domini Games.

The premise of Mystery Tales: Dealer’s Choices reminds me a little of last year’s acclaimed Edge of Reality: Fatal Luck, in that they share a casino theme. However, while the Edge of Reality sequel sticks the landing by integrating the casino theme all the way through, this game falters only after the first chapter. The main plot starts out fun and fascinating, but quickly descends into mediocrity with a predictable story development and uninteresting characters.

One of my pet peeves about Domini Games is that all their games look the same. Surely, the visuals in Mystery Tales: Dealer’s Choices are gorgeous and the saturated colors actually help add some variety to the locations. Still, the design and the layout of the scenes are derivative, unexciting, and could fit into any of the studio’s other franchises like Secret City and Dark Romance.

There is nothing fundamentally wrong about the gameplay of Mystery Tales: Dealer’s Choices. In fact, there is a good deal of creativity displayed in numerous aspects of the game. Unfortunately, the execution of these imaginative ideas is often far from perfect. For example, the hidden object scenes are usually clever, but risk being tedious or frustrating for impatient players. Another case being the puzzles, which might be great as standalones, but their overabundance depletes them of their novelty.

Mystery Tales: Dealer’s Choices is a long game, which is not necessarily a pro in the case of this game. Given how unengaging the game is, its four and a half hours runtime feels overly long. The Collector’s Edition comes with all kinds of extra features; a strategy guide, concept art, soundtracks, videos, replayable hidden object scenes, replayable puzzles, achievements, collectibles, morphing objects, and a customizable VIP Room.

Mystery Tales: Dealer’s Choices takes an interesting concept and dilutes it to just another generic paranormal-themed casual adventure.

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