Mystery Case Files: House That Love Built review for PC

I’ve always been a sucker for hidden object games. Studios like Alawar and Big Fish may never put out GOTY candidates, but there’s something reliably fun – at least for me – about their brand of adventure games that haven’t changed or evolved in 20+ years. They all look kind of terrible, their stories are silly, and their puzzles are often nonsensical. Nonetheless, I always find they’re a good way to pass an hour or two.

Unsurprisingly, Mystery Case Files: House That Love Built (sorry, “Mystery Case Files: House That Love Built Collector’s Edition” – apparently the Steam version comes with extra jigsaw puzzles and wallpapers that you can’t get just anywhere) doesn’t stray too far from the formula that was established over the previous 27 Mystery Case Files games. It’s mainly clicking around from one static screen to the next, looking for sparkling objects that signal there’s a puzzle to be solved or an item to be found.

Weirdly, for a hidden object game, there aren’t a lot of hidden objects to be found – at least not in the sense of a static screen filled with all kinds of nonsensical garbage. Instead, you have to solve puzzles that vary wildly in difficulty: there are some that require just a few clicks to solve, while others that are built around leaps of logic so wild that I had no choice but to use the skip button.

House That Love Built also features some voice acting and attempts at animation. Both are about as good as you’d expect…which is to say, they’re not great.

But that’s kind of the point of these games. They’re comfort food for a specific type of gamer, and they’re basically the same thing over and over again. Mystery Case Files: House That Love Built won’t appeal to anyone outside that niche, but for what it is, it’ll do just fine.

BFG Entertainment provided us with a Mystery Case Files: House That Love Built PC code for review purposes.