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8.4 ultra recommended
Miriel's Enchanted Mystery, from Myth People, is the second game in the very successful Miriel series. At an hour when time management games seemed to be getting stale, Myth People came along and released a fresh new game about a young girl running a magical general store. The original Miriel the Magical Merchant didn't put a new spin on time management games, but it was inventive and had a flexible story that allowed you to be either good or evil. And unlockable recipes!
In this sequel, Miriel has moved to her grandmother's hamlet of Heremoor, and as you might expect she quickly sets up a magical general store. Old habits die hard! Since Miriel studied magic, her grandmother asks her to examine a large, strange, rune-covered egg that appeared in the kind old lady's garden. Miriel thinks she might be able to unlock it, but she'll need the help of town mystic (and rune expert) Zag... and to get his help she'll need to give him snake oil, eggs, and of course assist him in finding various hidden objects he has lost around town. Anything to help out her grandmother!
As with most time management games, customers appear in your store and and ask for various items. Most, but not all, are food. It's up to you to give the customer what he or she wants as fast as possible, and collect the gold which they drop on the counter. The quicker Miriel serves someone, the more money that customer pays. (Almost no one does this nowadays, but this game takes place in a fantasy world straight out of the Brothers Grimm. Thank goodness we have pricetags here in 2009!) If you wait too long before fulfilling a customer's order, they'll get mad and leave - which means no money and probably some wasted time, too, if you made any sort of effort to prepare what they ordered.
Where the Miriel series stands out is the necessity of planning ahead. Your general store doesn't have a stock room or supply room or back room filled with food and merchandise. Instead, Miriel magically creates raw items as needed, which are then automatically placed on shelves in the store. These raw items are either sold directly to customers or used to create new items. For example, a customer might want to buy some bread. But all that's on your shelf is flour and water. Dump those two ingredients into the oven, wait a few seconds, and out pops some bread. Another customer might just want a bucket of water. That's easy - just give them the water directly. (I wouldn't want to live in Heremoor if I had to pay several gold coins every time I wanted some water! And I wonder what the customers do with all the buckets?)
The planning ahead aspect comes into play because you quickly can (and should!) fill your shelf space up with raw items if you think they'll be needed to make more complex customer requests later in the level. But if you go overboard and have too many objects and no customer wants that bottle of growth tonic you're holding, you'll have to dump it in the trash.
Each level has a goal. You might need to make 450 gold coins, or sell 5 cheeses, or collect 10 widjetywackets as barter from customers. The customers are many and varied, from the demure peasant girl to the elfess to the King's overseer who orders not by picture, but by printed text. All are nicely animated, though their entry and exit walking animations are straight out of Terry Gilliam's Monty Python animations - and that's not a bad thing, either. Naturally, your store can be upgraded by purchasing accessories from a traveling salesman.
By the way, if you see any strange flashes while reading this review, it's probably from my digital camera. I bought a new one last week and I'm still trying to figure it out. Who designs the menus on these things? Chimpanzees?
Simple hidden object scenes act as minigames, and to be honest aren't very compelling or memorable... but do function admirably enough as breaks between the levels at Miriel's general store. It boggles my primitive cat brain that anyone would advertise this game by mentioning the hidden object minigames, but I'm not a marketing genius. Thankfully, as with the previous game in the series you can unlock real recipes that use the ingredients in Miriel's store. If you really, really get into your games, like I do, there's no better way to cap off a day spent playing in front of the computer than by cooking up the same foods in your own kitchen that you were just minutes before clicking like mad upon.
Download Miriel's Enchanted Mystery