If there was one thing that I learned from watching movies last year, it was that rodents are responsible for some of the finest cuisine in the world. The story of a rat who longs to be a great chef should be strangely familiar to those that have given Mystery Cookbook a try. Similarities between Pixar’s hit film and this game aside, Mousy’s quest is filled with interesting animals and lots of seek-and-find fun.

Your adventure starts out in a French restaurant. Unbeknown to you, the master chef is also a big, fat, orange cat. You are about to become his main course, but you are able to convince the feline that the culinary arts run through your rodent veins. The cat tells you about the cookbook that his mentor once used, and that it has been scattered around the town, with various characters in possession of different parts of the cookbook. It is your job to collect all of the parts of the cookbook in order to become a mousy master chef.

The environments that you encounter are highly detailed, as are the objects that you end up having to locate in said environs in order to complete various tasks. The most common task will have you cleaning up an area in order to find a specific object. Once you’ve located all of the objects on the list, you’ll be asked to find one last object. Under this object you will find the lost item. There are a number of mini-games, as well, that pop up from time to time. Some include rotating the pieces of a picture into the proper alignment, finding all of a particular item in a scene, and finding the differences between two otherwise identical scenes.

If you get stuck in a particular scene, you can click on the plate of cheese at the side of the screen and get a hint. Finding pieces of cheese in the scenes will give you extra hints. One scene early in the game has you finding nothing but cheese, which quickly fills your hint meter up. If you click too many times in places where there is no object, you will be given a 20-second penalty on the time that you have to solve the scene. Unfortunately, especially in scenes where you are given a list of object names, this can become a problem, as the names can be a bit vague. Is it a jar or a can? Neither? Really? There goes 20 seconds. And a tiny shred of the tiny shred of sanity that I have left.

Like most seek-and-find games, the adventure here is purely linear, making the game little more than a series of hidden object puzzles with a story running through. This is fine as long as the story is well done. The story in Mystery Cookbook, while interesting, just didn’t grab me. The different quests your rodent alter-ego ends up on in order to find the parts of the cookbook don’t have a sense of cohesiveness. I tend to compare the stories to those in the Mystery Case Files series. The story here is cute enough, and the characters that you meet during your quest are definitely interesting, but there just isn’t much substance here. The graphics are top-notch, and the sound is quite nice, as well. The puzzles are enough to keep you busy for a while, but after that, Mystery Cookbook doesn’t offer a whole lot of substance to keep you coming back. If you’re looking for the main course, you may want to head elsewhere. But, if you want a nice, fluffy dessert, then give Mystery Cookbook a try.

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