Paranormal Agency: The Ghosts of Wayne Mansion (iOs) Review

Wayne Mansion is not your average upscale home. With a variety of ghosts ranging from a proper young lady with her heart set on a tea party to a mysterious purple cloaked figure seemingly determined to reel you in to a trap, you’ll need to keep your wits about you to solve this mystery. You play as an investigator at a paranormal investigation agency, but you really aren’t convinced that there’s anything more than human tricks at the heart of this mystery. Will you find a man behind the tricks Scooby Doo style, or will the Wayne Mansion prove you wrong?

Paranormal Agency: The Ghosts of Wayne Mansion is your typical hidden object adventure, where players spend most of the game searching for items both hidden in plain sight, and amidst a jumble of other objects. While most of the game play consists of finding items laying unassumingly around the mansion, there are also a number of object jumbles where you’ll search for a short list of specified items amongst a jumble on a fixed screen. While I would have liked there to be more of these, the ones that are there are well done – challenging but not overly so. However, most of the item searching is done just wandering around the mansion, and you’ll need to use trial and error to find items that are able to be interacted with. Normally that isn’t a problem, as the game gives you clues as to what you’ll need. But in this case, I found the way it was done to be a tad…annoying.

You’ll wander around the mansion and its grounds multiple times, exploring every nook and cranny for usable items. And then, you’ll go talk to someone or open a new room – and some of the items that weren’t usable before can now be picked up. It requires you to pretty much explore everything in every room over and over in some cases, which just gets really repetitive after a while. I would much prefer to be able to pick up items and not yet know how they can be used than to figure out that the spray bottle in the bathroom that I’ve examined four times can now be picked up. It may be just a personal pet peeve, but I found it to be less challenging and more as a way to arbitrarily add length to the game.

The story line in Paranormal Agency: The Ghosts of Wayne Mansion is a decent one. The mayor of the city has asked for your help, as the mansion and its various ghostly appearances and spooky noises is pretty much creeping out the whole town. You’ll interact with a variety of ghosts while you are there, each of them requiring you to perform some sort of task related to their personality. You’ll play Blackjack with a ghostly dealer (spoiler: he’s quite good), arrange tea for a polite young miss, and more. The mini games are often challenging, and offer a nice change from the standard for this type of game. You’ll need to place eight queens on a chess board without allowing any of them to take another and make a trick shot on a billiard table, and more. If you get stuck – or just want to stick to the hidden object stuff – they are all skippable after a short time.

Paranormal Agency: The Ghosts of Wayne Mansion offers some solid hidden object fun in the form of a spooky ghost mansion experience that introduces you to a whole cast of trapped spirits, each with their own sad story. There are a variety of interesting mini games that serve to keep things fresh and challenge your wits, as well as a number of fixed screen object jumbles that are quite well done. While I didn’t enjoy the way objects are unusable on one visit to a room, and usable the next, overall it’s a fun and casual adventure with an interesting story line.