Parent's Guide: Mystery Case Files: The Malgrave Incident - Age rating, mature content and difficulty

In Mystery Case Files: The Malgrave Incident, you play as a detective who's been invited to a mysterious island by a man called Winston Malgrave. Your mission? To scour the desolate and dilapidated island for purple dust, which he needs to revive his beloved Sarah. But as time goes on, and things start to look more and more sinister, it's up to you to work out what really happened all those years ago, before the island was abandoned.

Mystery Case Files: The Malgrave Incident is a hidden object game crossed with a point and click - you'll need to explore the island by clicking on arrows to move from scene to scene, picking up anything that might come in handy along the way, before using them to get past gates, over obstacles and to solve puzzles. Every so often you'll get a hidden object scene, where you're shown a very detailed picture in which you need to locate all the listed objects to harvest the dust and help out Mr. Malgrave.

While the concept of the game would be fairly easy for children to pick up and play, they'd likely stumble with some of the more difficult puzzles, and may not even know what some of the objects you're asked to find even are - callipers, decanters and candle snuffers all make appearances. And of course, because the game gives you a list of the objects you need to locate, a decent reading ability is pretty much a necessity. It's probably possible to fumble your way through it though, as there's a hint system for the hidden object parts, and you can skip the puzzles after you've tried and failed a few times - but it may not be much fun that way, and they'll likely drop it and go back to Mario.

Although it has a mysterious storyline, Mystery Case Files: The Malgrave Incident is completely free of violence, guts, gore, and bad language.

Mystery Case Files: The Malgrave Incident can be played entirely in four player - either in co-op in the main story, or competitively in the three different multiplayer modes. While only one player is capable of moving around the island, solving the puzzles and the like, everyone can join in with the hidden object scenes - and there's nothing to stop your friends contributing to the puzzle answers anyway. As for competitive, there's a couple of different twists on the standard formula - Classic Pick is your standard find-the-most-to-win affair, Swift Pick has everyone racing to find a specific item first and Tick Tock Pick has a bomb that alternates between players, and you'll need to locate an item pretty quick or the bomb will explode and you'll be eliminated.

Age Ratings

Format Reviewed: Nintendo Wii