Parents' Guide to Tiny Room Stories: Town Mystery

Ample interactivity helps make this exploration-oriented app fun. Tiny Room Stories: Town Mystery gives players some help with the investigation -- the main character, a detective, will appear from time to time with statements about there being nothing left to look at. While the graphics aren't life-like -- or even movie-like -- a number of neat visuals are included, such as steam from a bathroom sink revealing an image on a mirror that will help you advance. The settings you search for clues in vary by chapter and range from a residential home to an series of underground hallways, which helps keep things lively.

In addition to turning things over and looking for clues, you periodically need to solve primarily picture-based puzzles. A few may initially be tricky, and you're often on your own to figure out what you need to do because any directions received aren't very detailed, although you can watch an ad to see a walkthrough of the level. Players may, for instance, need to rotate squares with lines on them until they all appear to connect, or enter a code they've discovered somewhere else into a keypad. Once they do, doors pop open, secret passages are revealed, and other exciting twists can unfold. But the puzzles seem to get more complicated and come with less explanation as you play, which can be challenging. Some actions are repeated in the game, like picking up a lot of keys, but there's clearly been an effort to feature a variety of activities, such as placing candles you've collected on a candelabra to find which spots will depress when one is placed on them. The controls can, at times, feel cumbersome -- some rooms don't have full 360-degree turning capabilities, and you may find they need to click or swipe on things more than once to avoid entering a doorway or otherwise touching the wrong thing. Also, a cost is eventually involved if you want to keep playing after the first act. But completing just the first act alone can be an interesting experience -- and Tiny Room Stories: Town Mystery's cost is low enough that parents may not mind.