Blue Toad Murder Files: The Mysteries of Little Riddle: Episodes 1 - 3 is the first half of a season-long mystery series that takes adventure gaming into an interestingly different direction.

The look and feel of Blue Toad Murder Files feels much more like a Wallace & Gromit title with a not-quite claymation feel to it, but with characters and settings of the same basic not-quite-right proportions and features. Since the cast of characters isn't all that huge (four different investigator characters and maybe a dozen citizens of Little Riddle), the fact that each of the characters has a unique style about them isn't all that unexpected, but it is obvious that a good bit of time when into designing these characters to fit their roles. Whether it is the American redhead jewelry shop owner, or the lanky constable or bull-headed inspector, or even a hotel manager that looks a little too much like John Cleese to be coincidental, everyone looks the part.

Audio also seems to be spot on here. The background music does a good job staying out of the way, while the voicework really sells the small British town feel. I especially enjoy the narrator's voice, which is good since you will be hearing that far more than any of the other characters in the games.

Blue Toad Murder Files: The Mysteries of Little Riddle: Episodes 1 - 3 takes you through three mysteries in Little Riddle that all connect to the overall plot that seems to be haunting this sleepy village. The first episode, "Little Riddle's Deadly Dilemma," has the Blue Toad Murder team arriving in the town just as the Mayor gets murdered (just like any murder mystery TV series). Your goal is, of course, to take the investigation into your own hands (again, just like on TV) and solve the case and prove the local constabulary has the wrong suspect in mind. It's only when you solve this mystery that you realize that a bigger game is afoot, and more investigations are necessary.

The second episode, "The Mystery of Riddle Manor," has you finding some pilfered loot from the local mansion and the final one in this collection, "The Mystery of the Concealing Flame," kicks off with the Town Hall being set ablaze. While each episode is self-contained and gives you a nice recap of the prior events, to get the full effect, you really need to play them all (especially since playing the later episodes tells you the culprit of the previous ones).

In each mystery, you are asked to choose between one to four players, who take turns interviewing different people in the town and attempting to solve the various logic puzzles they throw at you. Each interview and puzzle is an attempt to gain some bit of knowledge concerning the particular crime you are investigating. For instance, in the first episode, you learn of four suspects (actually each episode ends up with four suspects), and when you get to talking to the doctor, the game will select one of the players and everyone gets to hear the conversation that takes place. When the doctor presents his puzzle though (you have to decipher what he intended to give the mayor based on what it sounded like), only the player selected by the game gets to do the task. The player is then awarded a gold, silver or bronze ribbon depending on how long he/she takes to finish the job and how many attempts it took. If you give up, then the game tells you how to get the answer and no ribbon is awarded. The players then choose who they want to talk to next, the game chooses the next player in line, and that character presents its puzzle.

There are several points in the mystery where the game tests your observation skills. At these times, the game asks each player a few questions about what they should have learned, either because a character said it, or because it should have been implied, or even just because it was something happening in the background. These pop quizzes don't seem to have any bearing on the overall game, but they are typically interesting bits of data that you will want and/or need to know in order to figure out who the culprit is, which is the last bit of each mystery. Once you have exhausted all twelve conversations (each mystery presents the same number of people to talk to and puzzles to solve), the game then asks each player to secretly choose who they think committed the crime. Once that is done, the bad guy is revealed and everyone's ribbons are tallied up to decide which of the four players came out on top.

While the game's mystery aspect is very intriguing, and you do have to pay attention to the details in order to solve the case, it is all just a clever way of encapsulating a bunch of logic-puzzle and deduction mini-games (in a very similar way to another recent casual adventure game I reviewed, Avenue Flo). As I mentioned above, each episode presents 12 puzzles, and while some are similar, they are all different enough to keep you on your toes. Some mini-games ask you to decipher messages like the Mayor's diary, while others present you with a set of rules in order to place objects in certain locations. One of these involved using the rules to determine exactly who paid what amount to the collection plate at the local church. In this case, the rules were statements like, each row paid twice as much as the row before it and each lower pew's sum was double that of the upper pew in that row. Another similar one was used to put a broken lantern together so that the stained glass segments had its colors (excuse me, colours) in the right places.

Meanwhile, other puzzles were simpler and typically involved merely being observant to figure out which item was different (though it's made harder since, in this case, the sails on the windmill are turning), or listening to an old lady talk about her luggage to determine which one of the lost-and-found bags is hers. An interesting one was simply counting money to determine how much was in the jeweler's book, but since it's all in pounds, shillings and pence (plural of penny), most American players will find it a bit challenging. At least there is a chart saying how many pence make a shilling and how many shillings make a pound. There is also a variety of sudoku puzzles where you have to arrange items on a grid to fit various rules (including a devilish "Magic Square"). Since this package includes three episodes, the grand total of puzzles comes to 36 and each one is an interesting challenge, though they are of varying degrees of difficulty.

As I mentioned above, Blue Toad Murder Files: The Mysteries of Little Riddle: Episodes 1 - 3 presents you with 36 different puzzles (and that's not including the pop quizzes and final "Whodunit" question), and while there is a range of difficulty between different mini-games within an episode, they don't seem to follow a particular progression. Of course, that might be because there is a bit of choice in the order that you can approach the different puzzles. In other words, there are quite a few times when you can choose to go to different places, and while you will have to go to them all, this can greatly affect how the episode's difficulty increase feels since you might choose to tackle a harder puzzle before an easier one. What I did notice though, was that the overall difficulty of the episodes seemed to increase. I was able to breeze through the first episode without many problems and earning mostly gold ribbons along the way, but either because it was getting late and I was getting tired, or because the challenges were harder, the subsequent episodes' mini-games seemed to be tougher. Unfortunately, I can't really go back and simply try them again and see if they are actually tougher since there is no randomness to the problems. In other words, the solution the first time is the solution every time and if you have any kind of memory, you will probably be able to simply remember the answer, which kills the replay value quite a bit.

I did find quite a few super-easy puzzles scattered throughout the episodes that simply involved observing a scene to count how many of certain objects are apparent. Granted, most of these are made harder because the things you are looking at are moving, but when compared to the others, they aren't really a problem. Other, slightly harder puzzles involve arranging parts of pictures to make a complete image, or simply listening to what people say and following their directions. There are also a few that I found easy, but that might just be because I have run into them on several occasions, either through my computer science classes or other adventure games. These include a simplified "Towers of Hanoi" and a "Shortest Path" problem. Then there were some really hard puzzles that involved using a complex set of rules to eliminate a bunch of similar objects in order to find a specific one. The most complex of these is called "Mister Fluffykins" where an old lady is looking for her favorite stuffed bear in a pile of very similar ones. The puzzle tells you rules like, only look at bears next to ones with pink bows and then only bears that either have a hat on, or the bear to its right has a hat on. It get's worse though, because after that set of instructions, you then have to add up all the numbers on their chests, divide it by another number and choose the bear with that number on its chest. Mind you, there is a time limit for getting the gold ribbon, and if you go past that, the best you can hope for is silver ... and that's only if you don't make any wrong guesses.

Blue Toad Murder Files: The Mysteries of Little Riddle: Episodes 1 - 3's most intriguing mechanic is how it handles making an adventure game multiplayer. I mentioned before that the game takes a turn-based approach to the mini-games. This is pretty much true all the way through the game. During the story, the game presents a particular player with a challenge, and then asks the next player to step forward. When a pop quiz happens, the questions are done in a similar manner; player 1 is asked a set of questions, player 2 is asked a different set, and so on. At the end of the mystery, the four suspects are lined up, and the game asks each player to choose their suspect by tapping the face button that corresponds to the suspect. Once all of the decisions are made, the culprit is revealed.

Another interesting aspect to the multiplayer approach to the game is how it handles the controllers. You don't need four controllers to play four characters, but you can if you want. Basically the game accepts input from all controllers as if they were the same controller. This means that you can just pass a single controller from person to person, or each one can have their own in their hands. The game will trust the players to handle who is actually sending in the input instead of forcing the players to actually have four controllers or forcing them to actually pass it around the room. It's not a big feature of the game, but it was one I found really interesting and a good way to handle multiple players in a genre that is traditionally single player.

I really enjoyed Blue Toad Murder Files, at least the first three episodes of The Mysteries of Little Riddle. It presents an amusing environment with quite a few crazy characters and a really good set of puzzles to work out. There isn't really any replayability, but the multiplayer aspect of the game means that family get-togethers could have a bit more fun in them (as long as none of the players have already beaten the game, that is). I just hope the last three episodes, "Death From Above," "The Riddles of the Past" and "Flight of the Felonious Fugitive" are just as good. If you have even the slightest interest in logic puzzles, mind benders or adventure games, then you will enjoy Blue Toad Murder Files: The Mysteries of Little Riddle: Episodes 1 - 3.