Features

Venice Mystery starts slow, but gains momentum the first time you explore the world beyond the solitaire mah jong game. Playing solitaire with power ups quickly bores, but that changes when maps, paintings, clocks and a mystery enter the picture. The game opens with a little information about the mystery that comes together a few rounds and two maps later. It takes time to learn and understand how the game works, what the power ups do, and what to do in certain situations.

The mystery: Find 13 lost paintings to solve a puzzle, to learn a secret and to prevent Venice from sinking. The paintings provide the clues to the secret by revealing passages and blueprints for a doomsday machine.

Unlike solitaire mah jong, you can remove any tile as long as it doesn’t have any part of a tile on top of it. A tile with another on the left, right or both sides of it is playable. Instead of matching pairs on the board, you get a hand of tiles for finding matches on the board.

You can match multiple tiles to one from your hand as long as you keep clicking on the available tiles one after the next. This gets tricky at times since clicking an unavailable tile (that you may not be sure about) stops the succession. It doesn’t take much to trip up the mouse and lose multiple tile clicking progress. While this is a neat feature, it might be a problem for people with mobility impairments and tired hands.

In Venice Mystery’s version of mah jong, you play until you find all of the keys within the time shown on the timer. Empty boxes on top of the screen indicate how many keys you need to find to finish the level. Some might find the mah jong part of the game too easy. After completing the level, a map of Venice appears showing your progress in finding the missing paintings. When you get close to finding one, it’s time for the first mini-game.

The screen shows the missing painting with circles below the painting. Each circle represents a spot on the painting, but they could be upside down or sideways. You must find the spot on the painting and turn the circle — if needed — until it appears exactly like in the painting and then click the spot on the painting where it belongs. This one is also a timed game and a hard one especially in the advanced levels where the colors all look the same in the painting. The painting puzzle mini-game is the hardest as I lose the most lives here.

Completing the painting puzzle leads to finding an object that requires visiting the clock tower for another mini-game. In this one, you rely on a blueprint with Roman numerals and symbols. The blueprint provides the needed clues for turning the dial to unlock another part of the puzzle. I get a little impatient with the dial game since the dial moves too slow for my taste.

I am not crazy about the design of the mah jongg tiles. They could be better in terms of graphics quality and design. The power up tiles have a neat transparent effect and flash without becoming an annoyance. Power ups do anything from revealing the location of the keys and swapping tiles to exploding tiles and morphing them. It takes time to get the hang of the power ups, but once I do — I enjoy using them. Joker tiles also appear with different numbers. These numbers indicate the number of tiles you can remove from the board regardless if they match.

With over 70 puzzles, Venice Mystery lasts a long time. I don’t believe all games must have at least two game modes, but this one would do well with regular solitaire mah jong for a second game mode. It is a great way to add replay value since not many want to replay a story.

Some may want to play the solitaire only game because they enjoy the game and power ups. It would be great to see a solitaire mode that doesn’t just copy the story mode and remove the extras. Instead, consider making it a little different in terms of rules and features. Venice Mystery blends all of the elements nicely to create a nice package. One hour of free play is plenty to decide whether the game is for you.

Download and try Venice Mystery.

System Requirements: Windows

• Windows ME/2000/XP/Vista
• 600MHz or faster processor
• 128MB RAM

Mac version coming soon.