Snoopy & The Great Mystery Club review for PC, PS5, Xbox Series X, Nintendo

You never want to judge a video game by its cover, but sometimes that’s easier said than done. Take Snoopy & The Great Mystery Club, for instance: it was published by GameMill Entertainment, purveyors of such legendarily bad games as The Walking Dead: Destinies and Skull Island: Rise of Kong (alongside other admittedly much less terrible licensed games). While it would take a lot for Snoopy to rise (or sink, I guess) to that level, just seeing the name is enough to at least raise the possibility.

Thankfully, Snoopy & The Great Mystery Club is nowhere near that bad. I wouldn’t call it a great game or a hidden gem, but it’s decent enough that it lives in that same so-so range that so many other GameMill games sit in.

Mind you, as a grown man, I may not be the right person to be evaluating Snoopy & The Great Mystery Club, seeing as it’s very much a game meant for children. It doesn’t have the kind of garish graphics or flashy appeal as your typical modern kids game, but the moment you embark on your first case, you can tell it’s meant for kids.

To be clear, I don’t mean that in a pejorative way. Rather, it’s a statement of fact. Playing as Snoopy – with Charlie Brown, Peppermint Patty, and the rest of the Peanuts gang either in tow or popping up around town – you basically go on a series of simple fetch quests, tracking down people and finding lost items for them.

As you might expect, it starts feeling monotonous fairly quickly. There are only so many times you can go back and forth across town, picking up new items each time, before you feel like the game isn’t really respecting your time. You get the sense Snoopy & The Great Mystery Club realized this, too, which is why they added some fairly easy minigames to break things up a little. Unfortunately, the minigames feel pretty repetitive too, so they hardly make the game feel more dynamic or exciting.

But, again, this game isn’t targeting someone like me, and I have a sneaking suspicion that kids might find it substantially more engaging. Snoopy & The Great Mystery Club is relaxed and undemanding, kind of what you’d think cozy games would be like if the term hadn’t come to be used for a genre that’s aggressively twee and “quirky.” If you have kids and want to steer them in this direction, you could definitely do a lot worse.

GameMill Entertainment provided us with a Snoopy & The Great Mystery Club PC code for review purposes.