Mystery Case Files: Huntsville™

fun! challenging but not extremely hard. good puzzles

Awesome Game....

Huntsville is the first of many Mystery Case Files games in the franchise. Because it was initially released in 2005, it has aged. Some of the objects are too pixelated and others are in sucker punch places. Also each case has a time limit, but it is fair, except for the Big Boss case. You only have 4 minutes to find the 8 items and construct the puzzle, which blows. Despite my gripes, this is a fun little game that you should be able to complete within 3 hours and perfect to sharpen your item-finding skills.

This is the first game in the Mystery Case Files series and it's a game that I always find myself coming back to it because it's a comfort game for me, the whole series is a comfort series and I'd love to find the books that were written years ago.

Huntsville is the inaugural game in the Mystery Case Files series of casual hidden-object-adventure games. Released in 2005, it tasks you to fill the shoes of a Rookie Detective as they become tasked with solving a spree of crimes occurring within a small town named Huntsville. As you play through the game and defeat its challenges in the form of finding well-hidden items within a maze of trash, you will climb the ranks of detective to reach the title of "Master Detective", the name by which your character goes by for the rest of the MCF titles. Being the first in the series, this entry lacks the more involved stories of its successors. What you see is really what you get. Every phase of the game goes like so: You learn the name of the baddie you are set to crack, and are given a randomly selected list of locations to find objects in within a small time frame. Allotted to assist you are three hints that do not replenish for the duration of that phase cycle, so only use them if you are truly stuck. Failing to solve a case in time causes you to have to repeat that phase from the beginning, with different items being selected within the new locations you can go to. Once you have found all of the items required to solve the crime and end the phase, you are given a sliding picture puzzle to complete to figure out the identity of your bad guy. Beware, you are still timed, so be quick! While the game play of Huntsville is solid and sets the stage for the better games to come down the line, it does unfortunately suffer from age. The images you need to comb through to find items aren't the best in quality, and the whole experience suffers from existing in a time where computer screens were smaller and the game was played on Windows XP. Younger folk who play this game out of curiosity may be unable to find certain items due to their differing looks to what they may expect, something that happened to me as a child when I played this off the CD-ROM in the 00's and 2010's. Lastly, be warned that if you play this game and like it enough to play the others, you will be stymied by the fact that certain later games in this series don't work on modern Windows due to their reliance on the dearly departed Adobe Flash. Unless you want to learn how to install an older version of Windows on a Virtual Machine, games like Dire Grove are, for the moment, unplayable. You can play this one though, and I recommend you do. Despite being possibly a little pricier than a casual game this old should be, I consider the cost to be worth it, nearly two decades later (Ouch). Seek and find, mysteries await!

While the overarching story is a bit simple, (Though that is fair for a first game in a franchise) I found it to be very enjoyable to play. This is primarily a hidden object game that was challenging without being too much so. I wouldn't recommend it for anyone who doesn't like hidden object games because, while I know later games in this franchise do branch out with puzzles and collecting objects, this one does not. Took me about two days playing constantly to complete (was sick at home all day).

It was ok. It is a hidden object game with a timer. On modern PCs if you press escape the whole game crashes.