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Welcome, detective. The biggest lottery ever in your fair city has just announced the numbers of the winning ticket. Dear old Grandma Rose had the winning numbers, and then somehow lost the $488 million golden ticket. There are only 12 hours left for her to find this ticket and get it turned in for her to claim her prize. To help her in this endeavor, she is offering a $20 million finders fee to the person that helps locate the misplaced item. You, being the kind (and desperate for a share of the loot) type of person that you are, have offered your services. You will search the city for Grandma Rose, leaving no stone, rolling pin, necklace, camera, tin-can phone, fire extinguisher or SpinTop undiscovered.

It seems that Grandma Rose must have wandered the city quite a bit. You'll visit 20 different locations (repeatedly) supposedly looking for clues to the missing ticket. For such a small community, they have a lot of diversity. You'll see a dive site (underwater hunting), cruise ship, factory, town fair, aquarium, fire hall (fire station), rec center, park, train, lounge, antique store, body shop, Chinatown, toy store, café, library, backyard, bathroom, garage sale, diner, and a bonus apartment location. While looking for the missing lottery ticket feels a lot like finding hidden objects from a list (because that's what you're doing) at least you'll have a little variety in the locations you'll be visiting.

You'll find a little twist that you can unlock while playing the standard story line of Mystery PI. There is a key hidden in each of the 20 standard scenes. Find each key and you'll unlock the unlimited seek and find mode. Unlimited seek and find is kind of interesting. You have to find every single hidden item at each of the 20 locations. Each location, you'll discover, has anywhere between 80 and 103 hidden objects. You can't just click on everything at random though. You have a short list of objects down the side of the screen. You can only successfully click an object when it's visible on the list. One cute thing I noticed as I played through the game — there's one object that you can potentially find in every location (though you won't be asked to find it every time). The developer is called SpinTop and you will find a SpinTop (either in form or word) in every scene.

Each level of game play follows the same pattern, though your tasks do get more demanding as you progress. Initially you have only two scenes to search and 10 items to find in each scene in the allotted time. You'll be covering a lot more ground by the time you get to level 20 — trust me. After you've found your objects at each location at each level, you'll go to a puzzle mode. The puzzle is always a matching game — but the rules change slightly. As with the typical matching game, you can only turn over two cards at a time. In Mystery PI however, sometimes you're looking for an exact match, sometimes matching color, sometimes similar types of objects and sometimes objects that are related (like a baseball bat and baseball, for example). Match all of your objects and you're rewarded with a clue towards finding the ticket. It's a piece of a puzzle. At the end of the game, you assemble the puzzle and then go to a new area to fiddle around with things, keep in the mind the clue given by the puzzle, and find that missing ticket.

The graphics for each scene are reasonably well done. The art is good and for the most part the objects look like themselves. I do have to take exception to the necklace object. I have never seen a necklace that looks more like a donut on a string. That's all I'm going to say.

The clues were straightforward — though actually a bit more so than I would have preferred. If you're looking for a word as opposed to the object, the clue is all in upper case. Generally, there is no ambiguity in what you're looking for. If you need to find a pipe — it's going to tell you to find a smoking pipe.

There are usually a few objects that you don't have to find for each level, but you can choose to go on and find everything for extra points. You gain various detective titles as you earn points, but they really didn't mean anything to me. I don't care about the points. I care about finding the objects before time runs out, and hopefully enjoying a good story along the way.

The music was kind of suspenseful, but got a little repetitive for me. There were some sound effects but nothing that particularly sticks out in my mind.

Mystery PI was decent enough as a find the hidden objects game, but the thin layer of 'find the lost lottery ticket' story just didn't do it for me. My searching didn't feel tied to that story and there wasn't enough meat to it to really draw me in. The mechanics of the search and find do what they need to do, but the story was meager fluff, at least to me. There's kind of a puzzle to solve at the very end, but you should be able to figure it out easy enough from the puzzle you assemble and by pretty much randomly clicking on things in that final scene.

I play a lot of find the hidden objects game so I feel I've seen a pretty wide range of offerings in this area. Mystery PI was a solid enough game. It didn't particularly blaze any new trails in the genre, but it did provide a reasonably well crafted excursion into testing one's ability to spot things in a scene. If you like hidden objects games and are waiting for the next big name offering, Mystery PI is a little something to tide you over in the meantime.