Return to Grisly Manor review - An adventure better than The Room?

In a world where games like The Room didn't exist, Return to Grisly Manor would be a perfectly acceptable mobile point-and-click adventure.

But such a world is thankfully a myth. The Room does exist, and because of it we've come to expect far more from first person puzzling adventures on our smartphones and tablets.

There's nothing particularly wrong with Return to Grisly Manor, but it's stuck in an old fashioned framework that fails to make the most of the hardware it finds itself on. And frankly that's just not good enough nowadays.

Is that a thing?

The game is a slightly whimsical point-'em-up set in and around the titular manor. It's been ear-marked for development and it's up to you to solve a series of puzzles to make sure that doesn't happen.

Everything is controlled with taps. Tap to look at objects, tap to interact with things, tap to move through the decent looking world and find out more about what's going on.

The puzzles follow the tried-and-tested vaguely esoteric logic of the genre. You'll find something you can't do anything with, then discover something later on in the game that you'll be able to combine with the first object.

You use a coin as a screwdriver, go diving for a strange key, remember a sequence of light flashes in order to lower the ladder to a treehouse, that sort of thing.

But there's none of the tactility or ingenuity that sets out the very best mobile adventures, and none of the retro SCUMM charm that elevates the other side of the tap-to-discover coin.

Everything is a little staid, a little generic, and while you'll have a reasonably fun time putting all the pieces together, you won't be able to shake the feeling that you could be doing something better with your time.

Time for a change

And the simple fact is that you could. Return to Grisly Manor doesn't so much rest on its laurels as reside atop them, happy to bounce along oblivious and old-fashioned.

It's not broken, it's not badly put together, it's just bland. And in a world of fizz bang shiny classics that twist and invert the structures of the adventure genre, bland is like a bag of plain crisps offered in place of an all you can eat buffet.

Return to Grisly Manor review - An adventure better than The Room?

A solid but completely unremarkable point-and-click adventure
Score
Harry Slater
Harry Slater
Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.