I’ve been meaning to try Mystic Inn for a while. The similarities to Diner Dash gameplay in a fantasy theme with sorcerers, witches, dragons and alchemy were looking quite appealing. Unfortunately I lacked the time to play it, until now.
In Mystic Inn, you play as Daphne, a young magic apprentice who wanders off too far in the woods only to find an old abandoned building with a sign that reads:
“Step inside and serve up drinks
More fun than you might think
Dragons may cause a kink
Shape a treasure, or simply sink.”
Intrigued, she steps inside, where she finds herself unable to leave and extremely busy between waves of patrons demanding all kinds of magic potions.
If you’ve played Diner Dash, you will be comfortable in Mystic Inn right away. The basics are the same: sit the customers, get the order, serve, collect. The main differences are a timer above everyone’s head to indicate how long they have until they leave, and you also have to make the potions by clicking on the respective button as many times as the potion is requested. And instead of money, you collect magic orbs.
Scoring isn’t as easy as in Diner Dash. Daphne can’t pick up more than two orders at the same time. She also can’t serve more than two orders in a row. The only bonuses you can get are:
- empty bar: you get 150 extra points if you have produced and delivered the right amount of potions, leaving the counter clear;
- fast service: you get 150 extra points for quickly serving the potions (the bar is the best for this bonus);
- double service: extra points are awarded if you serve two tables in a row;
- spook the dragon: the dragon steals potions from the counter, click on it to make it go away.
Your customers (witches and sorceresses) will order different potions in one “sit”, they won’t be having just one order unless you’re already nearing closing time. As the levels go by, you will have to deal with larger queues, manage the podium to keep people happy, keep the dragons away and even produce potions for take-out orders.
In between chapters, you will also get a bonus level where you have to click the right symbols as they scroll by to make special potions, within a time limit. You can have a speed potion, a potion to stop time and one to increase your magic.
While the speed and time stop potions are extremely useful in an emergency, the potion that increases your magic power seems to be pretty redundant, or maybe I didn’t find the right timing to use it. You can also have only one of each per chapter, and they don’t carry on to the next if you haven’t used them.
Some of the upgrades you get as you “level” aren’t so obvious and they lack a good explanation. A good improvement would be to make the upgrades selectable from a list.
The greeter that is supposed to keep your queue happy and make their timers go up didn’t seem to be working at all, so trips to the podium were very frequent even after getting her. The harp musician also didn’t seem to be doing much for the people sitting at the table.
Another annoying fact is that when there are magic orbs to collect at the counter it’s nearly impossible to click the dragon without picking them up.
While the music, sound effects and graphics in Mystic Inn are quite nice, and the mini-game is especially addictive, the storyline is lacking, and the ending was very disappointing. The final score is also pretty much redundant since you can’t even post it to an online scoreboard.
As fun as the Diner Dash type of gameplay itself may be, the mechanics aren’t up to par. Mystic Inn could have certainly used a good dose of improvements.
Special thanks to Kirem Weers Marnett and PlayFirst for providing the full version of this title.