Mysteries of Old Tokyo is a good game made of a bunch of parts that don’t necessarily combine well. It is ostensibly a mystery puzzle game in which you use a 90’s computer interface to navigate around Tokyo, find documents, and then use information from those documents to complete reports about the locations you visited. That said, the mystery element is really barely there and the puzzles are generally very easy. It’s best approached as an edutainment game for people who want to learn about some lesser-known parts of Tokyo. Luckily, that’s fine for me.
Mysteries of Old Tokyo takes place over 11 weeks, with each one tasking you with going to about three thematically linked locations. You always start from the Marunouchi Building next to Tokyo station, and you can use your handy PDA to plot a route on the train system to each of your assigned locations in turn. Once you arrive, you’ll get a couple of short documents about the place, possibly be assigned a new place, possibly meet a spirit, and then need to take a photo. Confusingly, despite the retro interface, all the photos, train network, and documents all make it clear that the game is set in 2025.
Once you’ve done that at all locations for the week, it’s time to return to the office. You’ll then need to match a few locations in your photographs to pieces of postcards of the same area about 100 years ago and fill in 5-10 blank spots in reports about the area with words from a word bank. This is the puzzle part of the game, but you should know that these are usually very easy. At least two of the blank spots are usually just the name of the location you’re looking at, and even when the answers aren’t completely obvious, there just aren’t enough combinations for it to ever be very difficult. Thankfully, while it’s not the greatest puzzle ever, the reports you unlock on the location afterward are genuinely interesting and full of fun trivia.
Finally, there are those spirits you may have talked to. After you’re done with your main report, you can optionally complete a spirit report, where you’ll be presented with everything the spirit said and asked to determine the year its story was set and which of its 5-10 statements was a lie. I think these could be a good bit more challenging as puzzles if you’re not very familiar with Tokyo, but if you are, a lot of the lies involve travel times or stations that you’ll immediately recognize as impossible even before you have all the clues. The stories also reuse dates a lot, so once you know when the Great Kanto Earthquake or Ii Naosuke’s assassination happened, that piece of future reports is basically free. Still, the writing comes to the rescue again. Even if these aren’t amazing as puzzles, the stories you unlock for completing them are worth the small effort.
Once you accept that this is really an edutainment game, you can appreciate a lot of otherwise pointless optional details scattered throughout. There are postcards with writeups and trivia for about a dozen locations you don’t actually need to visit. There are 3D models with detailed articles about a similar number of pieces of technology you can buy with money you save from being efficient with your travel. Not only is the train network fully modeled, there’s even a tool you can use to view its status in any year from 1860 to 2025 and plot a route between any two stations or postcards in any year. The postcards are from a real set someone made and include the original Japanese text alongside a translation. You can tell this was a labor of love.
Conclusion
Mysteries of Old Tokyo is a ton of fun as long as you’re willing to look past pieces that don’t quite fit together and either don’t know much about Tokyo or can accept low difficulty. I think it would have been better if it had fully committed to being edutainment or done more with the mystery idea, but the name will probably help it sell better and the incongruity is a small price to pay to get the game in front of more people. As a very nerdy way to learn a bunch of very nerdy facts, it’s excellent. I hope to see more games like it and will be keeping an eye on Bolerosoft.
Rating: 80%
Time to beat: 8 hours for 100%, but some of that is idle time. Probably closer to 7 if you’re fully focused and know Tokyo reasonable well, and maybe an extra hour or two if you do not.
Price: $13
Feel free to leave a question or comment below!
For more reviews, see my Steam curator page: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/43219041
For a game with a similar puzzle system, see Lost Wiki: Kozlovka Review – 10 Piece Jigsaw Puzzle
Leave a Reply