Mystery of Unicorn Castle: The Beastmaster

This is a tough recommendation that I'm honestly on the fence about, but in the end I did enjoy my time with most of the game, so it earned a positive review with some big caveats. First, this game sets you loose in a fairly large map for a point-and-click adventure game, with puzzles late in the game requiring you to revisit many areas throughout the game. I really enjoyed the scope of the game. Unfortunately it feels padded with some hidden object puzzles that feel arbitrary and not fun, especially when each image is reused on a subsequent visit. On the adventure side of things, some of the puzzles, especially late game, just require you to find a specifically shaped key to go in a lock, and there were a LOT of locks. The game has many options to prevent tedium and feeling lost despite the large number of rooms/screens. The map is a fantastic feature, allowing you to fast travel to any room you've visited and showing which rooms currently have something you can do in them. The game also has a hint system that will point out objects in the hidden object segments and guide you to the next item you'll need for puzzles. There are a few mini-game style puzzles, but there's a button to skip them (which I was very happy for when presented with my nemesis, the sliding tile puzzle). There are many, many items to find during the adventure. To avoid inventory clutter, any objects that no longer have a use are automatically removed from the inventory. This is helpful from a gameplay perspective, but leads to some odd situations late in the game where you need to locate a new tool in order to solve a puzzle that an old tool would have been perfect for. Generally the actions required to progress are logical and straightforward, so I never felt overly frustrated by a puzzle, but I also never felt particularly challenged by the game. That's not necessarily a bad thing, though; it felt good to finally find the key I needed to open a door I'd found earlier in the game, which gave me the object I needed to solve a puzzle somewhere else, which... So in short, Mystery of Unicorn Castle is a decent way to spend a few hours as long as you keep your expectations fairly low. It doesn't do anything particularly great or new and it isn't particularly challenging, but it is well designed and feels enjoyable to play.