Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery came out May 25th for Android and iPhone/iPad. It’s a game we’ve all been waiting for, but is it THE game we’ve all been waiting for?
Are you rich? Love games with pay walls that keep people like the dirty Weasley’s out? Then this game is for you! Obviously designed by Slytherins, Hogwarts Mystery will take from you like nothing else in the franchise. If you’ve ever wanted to read Harry Potter, paying for each chapter individually but geting the book free, this is the game you’ve been waiting for. If you like watching the movie, but turn it off every 5 minutes or so for hours at a time, this game’s for you.
For anyone else, the game is a rip. The rest of us will gladly pay for a game we can actually play than get a free one with a pay wall.
The game starts strong. You see an overview of the movie adaptation of Hogwarts and the characters from the movies that share the same names as those from the books. You get your letter. And everything starts as you arrive in Diagon Alley.
Once there, you make a friend (an obvious Ravenclaw). You get your books and supplies. However, there’s no learning or puzzles. One merely uses their energy. Yes, buying books can be exhausting. But having your character “look,” “examine,” and “study” is a tad… boring. It would have been far more gratifying to search the shop and look for the books. Or, figure out how to get staff to help you find them. Getting your wand it also pretty simple.
After Diagon Alley, the Hogwarts Express takes you and your new friend to Hogwarts, and you get “sorted” by picking your house. Yes, the Pottermore quiz or something could have been there. Instead we just pick our houses. I’m fine with this because if you don’t know your house at this point, you know how to find out. Also, it allows for game exploration as we play multiple times, allowing players to go through the “adventure” from four different house related view points.
The confusion for me comes from the fact that we know our wands from Pottermore, but we cannot pick this wand, we’re given one by the game. It may have been better for these two tasks to mirror one another.
But then, it’s clear this is happening in the movie universe, not the book universe. Pottermore attempts to canonize all three universes (books, movies, and play) even though they clearly do not fit together, unless the book and movie universes are side dimensions that only exists because of the play (the book universe being the correction of all the constancy issues within the movie and play).
In reality, this game seems to give us a fourth dimension where the Firebolt, that isn’t invented until Harry 13, comes out when he’s a kid. But it’s all fun, so who really cares about all that?
You hit the pay walls rather quickly. You must by gems or coins to buy items, energy, etc. The worst part is buying time. Need to do the next quest? It will cost you, or you can go outside and play like a good peasant. This really ruins the game for me. It’s not that I can’t buy these things, but that I won’t out of principle.
The biggest gratification of the game, for me, comes from the fact that it’s clearly meant for Ravenclaws. Rowan, the friend we meet in Diagon Alley, is obviously a Ravenclaw. The second friend we meet is a Gryffindor that’s not brave. This allows us to expand beyond our own house. And, our “enemy” is a Slytherin. It just feels like the game is meant to be played as a Ravenclaw, but that Gryffindor could work too.
Also, how hard would it be to actually use the in canon eagle & bronze for Ravenclaw???