Review: Snoopy and the Great Mystery Club
Snoopy and the Great Mystery Club is a new adventure game set in the Peanuts universe. I'm a sucker for Peanuts, even the incredibly dark first daily strip from 1950, so when this game was announced I was definitely, if cautiously, interested.
The game is a straightforward adventure game, for good and bad. It's divided into four different chapters, each with a different mystery to solve. The player exclusively controls Snoopy for the entire game, but occasionally other Peanuts characters will join your party. They have stats for some reason, but I didn't see any way they impacted the gameplay. Regardless, Snoopy and his pals have to run around solving puzzles and collecting evidence before solving the mystery and ending the chapter. To do this, Snoopy can change into various costumes, each with a special ability. For example, his detective costume comes with a magnifying glass, and the gardener has a leaf blower. Each chapter takes less than an hour so it's definitely a quick game.
The puzzles themselves are largely in the fetch-quest style. Go here and grab something before heading back to another person to drop it off. For example, in an early mission Peppermint Patty is missing her football so Snoopy dons his deerstalker and uses his magnifying glass to hunt it down by following footprints. Those footprints eventually took my party to the women's restroom in the school, but Lucy kept me from entering because I'm a dog and Charlie Brown was with me.
And that's the first complaint I have about the game. I assumed I had to remove Charlie Brown and find another costume for myself, but for some reason Charlie had to stay in my party. When I kept searching the area for a costume or something else I could use to lure Lucy out, I stumbled on the football. I'm not sure what the intended solution was, but that didn't feel like it. Where were the footprints supposed to take me? Was there a solution to the Lucy problem? There aren't a lot of walkthroughs out there so I'm still not sure. I approached the game like a traditional adventure, but I randomly stumbled on the item I needed without finding the solution.
There were also a handful of bugs. I needed to clear 11 leaf piles with Gardener Snoopy and when I did, the condition didn't trigger and I couldn't advance the story. Thankfully I wasn't soft locked (you can't manually save as far as I can tell) and a restart fixed it, but I was worried for a bit.
None of this is to say the game is bad. The music is wonderful, full of Vince Guaraldi licks and modern takes on the songs. There are plenty of minigames that are a bit simple, but they're varied and clearly designed for younger players. The dlc also includes extra flying games and 20 comic strips that can be read at newspaper stands around town. The graphics are stellar, the animation is fluid on my PS5, and the town is lively. There are a lot of "video game" things to do, like dig up random dirt piles or clear leaves to find marbles, which are the in-game currency.
Overall I'm glad I played this. It was a solid 6/10, but it was bumped up to an 8/10 when I played through it with my 10 year old.