Mystery Legends: Beauty and the Beast

Mystery Legends: Beauty and the Beast is an interactive hidden object game whose plotline is a dark sequel to the Beauty and the Beast tale. Not all is happily-ever-after in this land. An evil enchantress has cursed the land and turned the Beast to stone, scattering the Beast's soul to various parts of the world. The enchantress wants to take the Beast as her husband and is intent on destroying Belle in the process. It is now your job as Belle to go find the scattered Soul Shards and heal the land from the enchantress's evil.

The story begins when you receive a letter from an old friend telling you to go back to the village because something terrible has happened. You return home only to find creepy vines covering the place and all your animal friends either missing or turned to stone. 

The mechanics of the game is the same as any other interactive hidden object game out there. You use your mouse to navigate the world and move from one location to the next. Within these locations you will find hidden object scenes to search through and find key objects that will go into your inventory. You then use these inventory items to interact with the rest of the world, whether you use them to complete puzzles or to help advance you into the next part. You will have a journal located in the bottom right hand corner. This journal will keep notes on important findings (sometimes even hints to puzzles) and a World Map that you'll be able to access to see what other places are still in need of some investigating. Sadly though, you cannot use the World Map to jump from one location to the next; it is there simply for reference.

A note on finding Inventory objects: In a lot of games your cursor will change shape if you move over something that you should pick up. However, this does not happen in this game and so it is rather easy to mis-look something in the scene. 

The Hint button is in the shape of a mirror with Beast's image in it. This is located in the bottom left hand corner. When the Hint button is loading, sparks bounce around the rims of the mirror and the mirror itself is completed by piecing together broken shards. Do note that the Hint button takes a rather long time to load even in Casual mode so try not to use it unless you really need it. The good thing about this Hint button though is that your hint will not be used if there is nothing to do within a scene.

There will also be quite a number of cutscenes scattered around the game to tell the story. The narration is voiced but the animation is rather simple. You have an inanimate picture of a character simply zoom in or out if it's moving closer or further away. Still the graphics in this game are gorgeous.

Overall, an interesting game. The graphics are gorgeous but I can't really say anything for the music. The voiced-over cutscenes are a nice addition even if the animations themselves are really simple. What's also nice is that some characters are given a voice-over when you interact with them, even if their mouths don't move. Certainly saves you a bit of reading but this requires you to keep your volume on. So make sure you don't mute the game while playing. The storyline is a little cheesy to be honest. It's your typical bad vs evil and evil witches trying to steal away your husbands story. But do give this game a try if not for the graphics. I wouldn't really recommend this game as a must-have in your collection because nothing really struck me as "worthwhile" while playing this game.