Olivia's Mystery (SNES)

 

 Ages ago, I tried to review a Saturn game entitled Cube Battler, but for some reason, I just couldn't get into it at all, and couldn't force myself to play it enough to write a review of it. I was a puzzle game, that saw you moving and rotating cubes around to make a jigsaw puzzle, which was an animated FMV constantly looping in little bits on the faces of the cubes. Olivia's Mystery predates Cube Battler, and the pieces are 2D rectangular tiles rather than 3D cubes, but it is also a game about solving jigsaw puzzles in which the pieces all have a little bit of animation looping on them.

 

From what I remember, Cube Battler also had some kind of competitive element to it, too, which Olivia's Mystery doesn't have. Instead, Olivia's Mystery tells a story. The game's structure is incredibly simple: you read a passage of text telling a part of the story, then you solve a jigsaw puzzle depicting a little animated scene from that chapter. And that's the whole game! You can pick up the pieces, move them around, and flip them horiontally and vertically. There's also doubles of some of the pieces in each stage, and when you place a fake one in the correct position on the board, it explodes and vanishes.

 

Of course, this only wastes a few seconds, as you can just pick up and place the identical remaining piece and put it in the same place. It's actually pretty helpful, as when a piece explodes, you know you're going in the right direction, since they only explode in the right position and orientation. The start of each stage can feel a little overwhelming, with all the pieces scattered around at random, all playing their little loops discordantly. 

 

The story is pretty whimsical and episodic, feeling a little like it's being made up on the fly by a particularly imaginative child. It concerns a kindgom facing a water shortage, but you find water on the moon, along with an abandoned civilisation, but the moon water contains parasites that make the princess ill, and so on. There's apparently three endings, with the amount of time you take to get through the game determining which one you get.

 

This is an okay, mildly interesting game. I can't imagine anyone who isn't a massive jigsaw enthusiast buying at full price on release, and I'm sure there's no-one on earth who could muster up the enthusiasm to pay the prices for which it sells online these days. But emulating also means you can play the fan-translated version, and read the story, which is nice. You'll probably get an hour or two of distraction out of it before you get bored.