Snoopy And The Great Mystery Club is out now got PC and major consoles, and… Snoopy has a problem… his supper dish is empty! So, the greatest detective is on the case to find out why!
But there’s obviously more to figuring that out, since as you go to find your master, Charlie Brown, he can’t find his shoes; and then you head out to speak to the others, including Peppermint Patty, Sally, Linus, Lucy, Franklin and others, including some lesser known ones such as Shermy and, simply, Patty.
As more kids join your adventures, Snoopy quips – paraphrasing a famous line from Jaws – “We’re gonna need a bigger mystery club!”
However, as more of them join, although the likenesses are spot-on, you realise that their voices don’t really sound like the original cast. Sure, they’ve all grown up, but even those in the 2015 Peanuts movie sounded spot-on, so surely it’s possible for someone, today, to do that?
For a minor annoyance – and most likely for copyright reasons – this game DOES have plinky-plonky piano music, but it’s completely different to what’s in the cartoon and feels completely random.
What surprised me quite early on is just how lengthy the chapters are. When the intro chapter ran for almost 15 minutes and accounted for 5% of the game’s total, I figured every chapter would be the same, but no.
Beyond that, there are four main chapters, each of the first three taking almost TWO HOURS to complete each! That’s insane!!!! That said, I see that the first main mission accounted for 28% of the game’s total, then roughly another 30% for each of the next two. I could possibly understand the first main one taking a long time, given that it introduced a lot of the characters in the game, but then you get a handle on how the game works.
For example, as I go to look for something belonging to one character, it can require heading over to someone else who’ll advise you to go somewhere else to collect something, but then only if you’ll do something for THEM first! One such item was a series of five jacks belonging to Patty for which she’d lost them in various places nearby, all of which needed to be dug out of the ground. What had she been doing with them?!
Similarly, Franklin lost a key just mere metres from where he’s stood, again which was buried in the ground. This seems to happen so often that even Snoopy comments on that at one point!
In fact, you’re heading here and there so much that Snoopy And The Great Mystery Club often feels like a walking simulator. Okay, so you can get about quicker by using the bus stops to ‘fast travel’ – something which I didn’t initially do, but I did get to the point where I thought: Why can’t everyone just find their OWN stuff?
While some of the game mechanics take a little while to get to grips with, trying to throw a ball to Patty or Shermy at the bat is just so unnecessarily difficult. It’s not clear exactly how it works. You have to hover the ball on a small circular map, and then press A. And then, it’s so hit and miss as to whether it actually works.
Sometimes, people aren’t where they’re meant to be. For example, I was told to find Sally in the camp office building in chapter 4, but she wasn’t inside, and only when I went back OUTSIDE did I find her there…. a short distance away from it!
Similarly, while you need all 8 Woodstocks around the map in order to progress to chapter 4, although I found four of them before this chapter, not only did it steer me to find the other 4, but one wasn’t even available BEFORE that moment!
The length of each chapter in this style does grate, because I thought at first, if you had a PC/console crash, or the gameplay doesn’t record properly, I figured you’ve got to do the whole damn thing all over again! And if it DOES save mid-mission, what if that gameplay didn’t work out?
Plus, it’s also a kid’s game, essentially, so do why is no indication given as to how long each chapter is going to go on for?
And then it hit me… I’m in the final chapter of the game, and up to 92% of the game in total (and 52% within Chapter 4, itself), at the point where Franklin has told me to go over to the canoes. When I get there, Charlie Brown and the others make mention how there’s tracks from where they’ve been dragged and that we should follow them, but when you get to the other end of the track (only a short distance), Charlie Brown should make mention of the footprints of the person who’s done it. (which, ironically, I only learned from videos by certain individuals breaking the embargo! DON’T DO THAT! IT RUINS IT FOR EVERYONE!)
I don’t know if it’s just a PC game issue, but after following to the end of the track, Charlie Brown stays silent, so the line doesn’t trigger and I can’t get any further ahead.
And then I found out that the game autosaves along the way, as opposed to letting me save to separate slots in case of any such problems, so as well as being completely stuck, I can’t go back to an earlier save as I might do with other games, and wit the chapters being so long, I can’t even try restarting the one I’m on as there’s no option for that.
So… since there are three save slots (even though each one saves as it goes), I’ve started again on No.2. I’ve got to the start of Chapter 4, but don’t want to go any further until I can figure out where the hell the save files are within Steam, because I’m not going through all that again, and if the PC version is actually broken, then that’s no use whatsoever.
The “single-save-slot/autosaves” madness also happened with GameMill Entertainment’s recent Goosebumps: Terror in Little Creek. Please stop this. Just allow us to MANUALLY save, and give us several slots, so if something goes wrong – as has happened here – I’m not stuck and unable to complete your game!
I actually ended up whizzing through the game a second time to get to where it broke, and it DID work this time, so I could complete it, but if you’re using this on PC and want to save manually, I eventually found the game saves are in C:\Users\(name)\AppData\LocalLow\Cradle Games\Peanuts\76561198101831713\local.
The 3 save slots are local1.json, local2.json, and local3.json. To demostrate, I briefly started a third game, completed one task and quit the game, and found it had created No.3, then renamed that so it couldn’t find it, and the game now thinks there’s no 3rd game save. I wanted to test it on a separate save, rather than ruin one of my existing ones. Phew! I then went back and finished the fourth and final level.
Overall, Snoopy And The Great Mystery Club is worth a look, but as well as the programming issues, there are gameplay behaviours – such as when you throw a baseball – which really need redesigning, the autosave system just needs scrapping, but for its target market, the chapters should be broken up into much shorter segments.
Score: 6/10
Thanks to our friends at GameMill Entertainment for the review code for this game.
Snoopy And The Great Mystery Club is out now on Steam, and the respective online stores for PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch.
Important info:
- Developer: Cradle Games
- Publisher: GameMill Entertainment
- Players: single-player
PC specs:
CPU: AMD RYZEN 9 7950X3D
Motherboard: MSI MPG X670E CARBON WIFI AMD X670 S AM5 DDR5 PCIe 5.0 4x M.2 2.5GbE AMD EXPO™ ATX
RAM: 64GB (2x32GB) Corsair DDR5 Vengeance RGB PC5-44800 (5600Mhz)
Graphics Card: Sapphire Radeon RX 7900 XTX NITRO+ 24GB GDDR6 Ray-Tracing RDNA3 6144 Streams
1st Storage Drive: 2TB Samsung 990 PRO M.2 (2280) PCIe 4.0 (x4) NVMe SSD TLC V-NAND 7450MB/s Read 6900MB/s
2nd Storage Drive: 2TB Samsung 870 QVO 2.5” SSD SATA III 6Gb/s MJX MLC V-NAND 2GB Cache Read 560MB/s Write 530MB/s 98k/88k IOPS
3rd Storage Drive: 2TB Samsung 870 QVO 2.5” SSD SATA III 6Gb/s MJX MLC V-NAND 2GB Cache Read 560MB/s Write 530MB/s 98k/88k IOPS
4th Storage Drive: Seagate IronWolf Pro 14TB NAS 3.5″ SATA HDD/Hard Drive
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.