City of Secrets Review

When I started City of Secrets it was like finding a delightful portal to my grandparents house. As a child, I'd spend hours on end playing LucasArts point-and-click adventures like this on my grandpa's computer. The bad thing, though, is that while City of Secrets is so clearly influenced by the great things these fantastic classic adventure games did, it also does little to alleviate their mistakes. Combine this with its sometimes poor use of the touch screen, and what you have is a fun adventure tempered by moments of frustration.

An adventure is nothing without a hero, and in the case of City of Secrets you get two of them. Throughout the lengthy story you alternate playing as a dog named Rex and a mole named Moles. They accidentally crash into a mole city, resulting in the arrest of Rex and sending Moles on a quest to free his friend. Of course, this simple premise becomes more complicated as you go, and before you know it you're entangled in a silly, charming story that goes way beyond the initial premise.

It's easy to get bored with a point-and-click -- or point-and-tap, as the case may be – adventure without quality writing, but City of Secrets delivers. The characters are fully voiced, and they drop witty quips all the time. The way the characters repeatedly break the fourth wall could easily become annoying, but the delivery is so perfect that it didn't bother me. If anything, it made it easier to forgive some of the missteps City of Secrets takes. At least partially.

City of Secrets' starts to flounder a little when it comes to its puzzles. Puzzles are a large part of an adventure title, and while plenty of them are challenging and rewarding here, there are an equal number whose solution is so obfuscated that I couldn't help but use the tip button. Granted, it's awesome that a tip button is included, but a puzzle is problematic when even the tip calls out how confusing or stupid the solution is. If you're determined to beat it without the tip button, all I can say is god speed.

Part of the reason the puzzles are so difficult is due to the nature of playing the game on an iPhone. Unlike a PC, where you have a mouse icon that you can move around the environment to see if an object is interactive, you can only tap on the screen of the iPhone. This means that you can pixel hunt by carefully tapping around only to miss the interactive part by the slightest margin, ultimately resulting in a moment of exasperation where you tap the hint button just to see what you've been searching for. Maybe this could be alleviated by having a cursor on the screen that you can move around, but as it stands now it really impedes the pacing to have to hunt for something I already know is there.

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