Mata Hari

Secret Missions: Mata Hari and the Kaiser's Submarines: 2008 Casual
Mata Hari : 2009 Adventure (not yet released)

While the first full-fledged adventure starring the exotic Dutch dancer still awaits, the double-crossing spy has quietly been working the casual game scene already in Secret Missions: Mata Hari and the Kaiser's Submarines. Sneaking a new protagonist in between Holmes mysteries, this game is also a Frogwares creation, released several months after Persian Carpet. Fortunately, they were clearly months well spent, as the new title is a significant improvement over the great detective’s not-so-great endeavour, though a few of the same weaknesses still linger at times.

Avoiding any reference to those pesky "German spy" allegations against the real Mata Hari, the game's story centers around Mata's attempt to find plans of a German sub attack in 1916, as such proof will draw the Americans into the fray and turn the tide in favour of the Allies. To do so, she’ll need to patch together loose pieces of a map conveniently scattered around Europe that display the location of hidden U-boats. It’s a very lightweight premise, and the storyline is almost a non-factor, serving mainly as an excuse to traipse around the globe from France to Spain to Switzerland to Germany (all in the blink of an eye), scour each new location, and get all dressed up.

Yes, in an exercise that has “prime casual game demographic” written all over it, Secret Missions has players dolling Mata Hari up to suit her seductive purposes. Each of the game’s seven supporting characters has weaknesses to exploit with the proper attire, and players must sift through three levels of wardrobe choices (hair, body, and accessories, each filled with many possibilities) to best effect. It’s a perfectly legitimate task, though the game’s two difficulty settings have a hard time finding a happy medium: the easy setting essentially solves the puzzle for you, while the hard setting offers no feedback at all to where you’re going wrong, and the clues you’re provided are often too vague to pinpoint the problem yourself.

The other key change from Sherlock comes between most of Mata Hari’s fourteen missions. From her hotel room, she’ll need to stay in touch with spy central by sending and receiving encoded messages. Receiving messages means solving a three-part, somewhat-Mastermind-like colour-coding sequence, while sending messages requires a complex wire-connection puzzle, always done twice. Each task ramps up in difficulty the farther you go, and though the higher difficulty setting doesn’t seem to make the hardest ones harder, it does ensure they get more challenging more quickly.

The rest of the game follows much the same pattern as Persian Carpet, but enhanced here in small but important ways. Static locations are filled not with lots of random junk, but only the few extra things you’re required to find in each. Your search list again shows silhouetted items, and some can only be found by switching to a close-up view or solving a self-contained inventory puzzle first. Fortunately, this time any item that can’t be found immediately is indicated, preventing you from wasting your time fruitlessly. Less fortunately, the game still imposes some frustrating pixel hunts, sometimes for items and sometimes only for “action” cursors. Back on the plus side, this time hotspots become highlighted when you pass the cursor over them, and sometimes you can get lucky. (I’d tell you to get your mind out of the gutter, but Mata does get plenty of offscreen action, so it’s probably right where it needs to be.)

Each mission includes one standalone puzzle to solve, and most of them are pretty entertaining, though for some reason instructions are never offered unless you click the “Help” button (this after some rather intrusive tutorial message boxes dominating the early stages of the game). You’ll encounter the likes of facial reconstruction assignments, pattern identification, a jigsaw, Sudoku, and a few tile-based minigames, plus a boring click-and-slowly-drag (and drag is right) exercise to uncover hidden images carried over from Sherlock. Some puzzles are identical even on the harder setting, while others increase the difficulty somewhat, though always manageably. Any puzzle can be skipped entirely, however, and if there’s any limit on the harder setting, I didn’t reach it.

Unlike Frogwares’ earlier title, there are no limits to item location hints, either, only a short recharge period for the hint function. This is a much better idea, discouraging over-dependence but not punishing players who need more help than they thought they would at the start of the game. There is no timer running throughout Secret Missions, even during one simulated bomb-defusing sequence, so players can take as much time as they’d like. A score for each mission is tabulated, taking time and the number of hints used into account, but this seems to have no bearing on the game itself.

Production values remain typical Frogwares, with nicely designed period locations (although repeated a few times too often) and wonderful orchestration supporting the experience. There are no voiceovers at all, a few too many typos made the cut, Mata's dancing is only ever alluded to between scenes, and the story takes some rather absurd leaps near the end in its haste to seem more substantial than it is, but it’s clear that Frogwares felt more comfortable with the “casual” nature of this game, and the result is a definite step forward. The entire game took me only three hours to complete, but the Kaiser’s Submarines managed to deliver twice the enjoyment in half the time of its Holmesian predecessor, so it may just be worth a look if you’re up for something "lite" to tide you over until the main Mata Hari adventure still to come.

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