The Agency of Anomalies: Mystic Hospital
Game Review

Agency of Anomalies: Mystic Hospital is a science fiction adventure game by the makers of the Echoes of the Past series. It is a more mature type of game, with themes related to human experimentation, genetic engineering and wartime desperation. The atmosphere of the game is therefore understandably darker and more depressing than your typical hidden object game.

The game begins with you - an investigator for the Agency of Anomalies in the 1920's - meeting a client about his case. He tells you that he used to work in a military hospital that experimented with paranormal energies, injecting serum into participants in the hope of creating super soldiers to fight in World War I. The hospital exploded though, and he was the only survivor. Ten years have passed and new paranormal activity has now been detected at the hospital site. Your task is to investigate the hospital ruins and find out the cause of this new energy spike.

Armed with a device capable of absorbing these energies, you make your way on your own to the hospital ruins. Personally, I would rather send an entire platoon of armed men instead of a lone civilian investigator to investigate a potential rift in the fabric of space! But the feeling of being alone in a rundown and creepy environment makes for a riveting game, similar to the psychedelic games Haunted Halls: Green Hills Sanitarium and the Redrum game series.

You spend the game exploring the hospital grounds, and slowly discover the various supernatural beings roaming the place. What's really great is that whenever you meet one of these creatures or get a hold of their dossiers, you are taken to a beautifully voiced and animated cutscene describing how the hospital's experimentation caused each creature to be created. In a way, the story is reminiscent of Marvel Comics' Captain America or the characters in the Heroes TV series, where dangerous human experimentation gave rise to people who were more than human, and sometimes to creatures who were no longer human.

The gameplay is similar to the majority of hidden object adventure games. You explore various locations around the hospital ruins, overcoming obstacles and progressing through the game by solving puzzles. There are quite a number of obstacles and puzzles that will remain unsolved as you work your way through the game searching for the right tools or puzzle pieces. Thankfully, the game helps you manage all that by providing a helpful "quest log" detailing the various objectives that you have yet to complete.

Looking closer at some of the puzzles will take you to either a puzzle minigame or a hidden object scene. The puzzles are of a wide variety, including manipulation, pipe-connecting and logic puzzles. Both the puzzles and the hidden object scenes aren't too difficult to solve, and both are depicted very well in the 1920's postwar style.

The game gets points for staying true to the feel and style of the postwar time period; you won't see a cell phone or modern machinery sticking out like a sore thumb. There are also a few other nice touches that make the game more engaging. You can collect a set of wartime postcards as you explore the area, and the dossiers and files that you pick up do a good job of expanding the story. The art style is dark yet beautiful, and suits the 1920's theme very well. There is also liberal doses of sepia to capture the postwar feel.

Agency of Anomalies is a great story and an engaging game, though it does touch on creepy and macabre themes such as human experimentation and death. You will love it if you liked similar games such as Haunted Halls: Green Hills Sanitarium or the Redrum series. You can get the basic version of the PC game, or you can get the Collector's Edition which includes bonus material such as additional gameplay, more locations and other extras. Or get the basic version or the Collector's Edition of the Mac game.

Check out the other games in this series!

Related PC Games at Big Fish Games:

The Agency of Anomalies: Mystic Hospital Collector's Edition

Haunted Halls: Green Hills Sanitarium

Redrum: Time Lies

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