A Sleuthing Sim That’s All Errands
Snoopy is 75 this year. That’s a healthy haul for a dog who’s spent most of the seven decades sleeping and imagining different lives.
To celebrate the milestone, GameMill Entertainment and Cradle Games have leaned into the ‘imagining different lives’ bit. Snoopy & The Great Mystery Club is a game that takes one of Snoopy’s most memorable personas – his deerstalking detective – and fleshes it out to create a sleuthing game. You, Charlie Brown, Peppermint Patty and the rest of the gang are solving crimes in your neighbourhood.
Working for Peanuts
Probably Snoopy & The Great Mystery Club’s greatest achievement is creating the world of Peanuts and inviting you to explore it. If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to explore the scenes from the comic strip, or how the various houses, schools and sports parks interlock, then Snoopy & The Great Mystery Club very much ticks a box that deserves to be ticked.
You are mostly free to explore it as you want. Sure, there are quest objectives nudging you in certain directions, but it feels very in-keeping with the laid-back nature of the comics to ignore them and stroll. So, you can visit the park, forest and – most importantly – the houses of Linus, Lucy and others. Well, not inside all of them exactly, but you get to visit and hang out, which has been all-too-rare in Snoopy licenses of the past.
The other notable achievement of Snoopy & The Great Mystery Club is that it’s not just concerned with Detective Snoopy. He’s a dog of many disguises, after all, and there are different iterations of him to slip into. Leafblower Snoopy can clear leaf-piles to access new routes. Digging Snoopy can rifle in soil mounds. Most importantly, Dogfighting Snoopy can chase the Red Baron in the skies of his imagination, flying biplanes through hoops in an effort to catch him. Most are accessed with a nudge of LB and a selection on a radial menu.
What these different disguises mean is that the world of Snoopy & The Great Mystery Club is something of a Metroidvania (albeit as Metroid-lite as it gets). Areas can only be accessed once you’ve got the corresponding disguise. So, you might want to make at least some headway on the cases if you want to go everywhere.
Snooping Doggy Dog
Which is where the wheels fall off the soapbox racer. While the world is begging to be explored, and feels joyfully authentic to the comic, what you actually do in Snoopy & The Great Mystery Club is anything but.
There are four cases to be completed, and each of them is suitably innocuous. We didn’t expect to be solving the murder of Linus (blanket around the neck, obs) or anything, so finding lost gym kits, exploring a sighting of a sea monster, and wondering why kites keep going missing is pitched just about right. There’s the initial glamour of a mystery to be solved, and only a scrap of evidence to work with.
What follows isn’t what we would call detective work, however. The objective marker nudges you from character to character, but none of them will help unless you give them a hand first. Ninety-percent (and we are not exaggerating) of each case is running errands for people, getting them a doohickey before they start talking with you. Except that doohickey is held by someone else who wants something in exchange, which is being guarded by someone else who wants something else. And so on. And so on.
There were moments when we wondered if we would ever reach the end of the chain. Making a piano and a soapbox racer becomes one of the most gruelling, longwinded quests in gaming. Genuinely, the piano took us about thirty minutes to complete.
I think the makers of Snoopy & The Great Mystery Club know that this is the glaring flaw of their game. In the final two cases, characters start to get a bit meta, referencing the endless back-and-forth and getting existential about whether this is what life is all about. It’s not hard to imagine the writers and designers being told to pump Snoopy & The Great Mystery Club’s numbers, getting it to a 15-20 hour game, only to be given a few houses and some minigames to work with.
The Greatest Mystery of All
What it means is that Snoopy & The Great Mystery Club doesn’t feel anything like a detective game. Sure, there is a deduction moment at the end of each case, where you, the player, gets to pick four pieces of evidence as being the most relevant to the mystery. But you don’t get to point at someone and say “J’accuse!”, nor do you get to make a conclusion yourself. Instead, you get to feel like Snoopy the Errand Boy. Any deduction is done by other characters, spewed out in dialogue after you’ve got them that plank they’ve always wanted. And even then, some cases simply don’t make sense. We still have no idea what happened with the kite mystery.
If the errands were fun, there might have been a silver lining. But they are an endless series of going here, then there, and then back to here again. Snoopy & The Great Mystery Club loves a spot of walking, ideally mixed in with some backtracking. Sure, there are bus stops that act as a fast travel network, but the cases are so back-and-forthy that even walking to them is an unholy chore. There’s no feeling quite like getting the final component for someone, only for them to say “wait, no, I actually wanted a different version of that”. One moment involving glue had us literally screaming at the screen.
There are a few asterisks, but not many. One case, set inside a concert hall, feels like it’s written by a different team. It’s a genuine mystery with an actual ending, and it’s set inside a discrete-ish area that dodges the feelings of fatigue. But it’s also got the game’s worst sequence – the piano! – so there’s that.
And there are minigames, trotted out ad nauseum, that attempt to enliven proceedings. Some are quite good, like a baseball pitching game that requires you to multitask. It’s the gaming equivalent of tapping your belly while rubbing your head. Plus the soapbox racing and biplane stuff are fine. But for every good minigame there’s an out-of-tune rhythm action minigame that gets wheeled out about ten times with the same music (and button mapping).
A Great World, a Gruelling Game
75 years is a hell of an achievement, but Snoopy & The Great Mystery Club is not the way to celebrate it. It may claim to be a detective game (and the prospect of playing one excited us), but it’s more like an Errand Simulator. And as much as they may try, Snoopy and Charlie Brown are not capable of making that whimsical and fun.
Important Links
Snoopy’s On The Case in The Great Mystery Club! – https://www.thexboxhub.com/snoopys-on-the-case-in-the-great-mystery-club/
Snoopy & The Great Mystery Club is a New Adventure Coming This October – https://www.thexboxhub.com/snoopy-the-great-mystery-club-is-a-new-adventure-coming-this-october/
Buy Snoopy & The Great Mystery Club on Xbox – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/snoopy-the-great-mystery-club/9P22J1FTMVC4/0010
There’s a Deluxe Edition – http://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/snoopy-the-great-mystery-club-deluxe-edition/9N8789GFWKFN/0010
