Dark Asylum: Mystery Adventure

Asylums seem like the perfect places to get haunted, since they look pretty creepy even when they are completely functional. Once they are abandoned, on the other hand, they turn into ghost magnets, or so would every horror movie out there have you believe. Granted, they probably don’t need to contain any spirits to make visitors feel uneasy.

Dark Asylum: Mystery Adventure is a hidden object adventure game in which you have to play the role of an investigator trying to figure out the mystery behind a haunted asylum. However, this one isn’t abandoned, so you’ll also have to get friendly with the residents and obtain information from them. Spirits, voices and various other creepy experiences complete the atmosphere and make for a pretty interesting story.

The gameplay is a bit different from your usual hidden object game, in the sense that there’s more to it than just looking for items. Each room has multiple zones you can investigate, and you can do so multiple times, with different items. For some reason, you have to pay with money or hit points in order to enter, but you can also use the cash to acquire artifacts or weapons to kill the monsters.

Even with these changes, the gameplay becomes repetitive rather quickly, mainly because most hidden object rounds are very similar. You usually have to find six items, but the said items are recycled over and over again if you try to complete a specific zone. Naturally, they are not always in the same place, but it’s difficult to stay excited about the puzzles when they repeat themselves.

As far as the technical parts of the game are concerned, the game certainly looks decent, at least if you do not have very high expectations. The artwork is nice, and some of the locations are quite moody, but they also seem rather small. You may also have some trouble with the interface, because it can be difficult to figure out what you should be doing at first.

All things considered, Dark Asylum: Mystery Adventure is not the brightest of the bunch, but it can still be a decent distraction if you are into hidden object games. The creepy atmosphere is quite rare in the genre.