Let me confess up front that while I own a few old Hardy Boys mysteries, I’ve never read them. Trixie Belden and her friends were my teen sleuths of choice. I can tell you how the gameplay worked for me, but I’m not going to know how well they captured the spirit of the Hardy Boys in general, and for that, I apologize.

The game opens with the boys, Frank and Joe, being invited to Paris to ride the Royal Express. Supposedly clues to the hidden lost treasure of the Romanov family (last Tsar of Russia) are on the train. Once a year, certain people are invited to ride the train and try and solve the mystery. This year Frank and Joe got picked, along with a rude Baron who claims to be the rightful Romanov heir, a pompous Russian art scholar named Alexey, a British historian named Carol, and a young girl working the trip as a waitress named Isabella. Outside the train the boys are periodically contacted by the mysterious Samantha — apparently some kind of spy that’s helping the boys for reasons of her own. (You’ll even play as Samantha on occasion. You’ll know you’re Samantha when your PDA has turned from blue to pink.)

While the characters are what I’d consider “vintage,” the trappings of the adventure are not vintage at all. One of the main tools you’ll use during the game is your PDA. It helps you track your clues, manage inventory of found things, get a list of open tasks and do game maintenance things. I’m pretty sure the original Frank and Joe Hardy didn’t have PDAs or cell phones.

The dialog between the boys is mainly a comic book format. Most of it flows along reasonably well. At the beginning of the game, though, I wanted to be able to click through the screens faster to get things moving, and I wasn’t able to find a way to do that. Conversations with many of the other characters give you a menu to select what you want to ask or say to the other person. So far I’ve been able to ask each option so it doesn’t appear to matter in which order you ask the questions/respond.

Once you understand the controls, it’s easy to move through the game and explore objects. You’re using the stylus on the touchscreen for pretty much everything. Glide over the right spot and you’ll see arrows for movement or a way to examine an area or object more closely. While there is a tutorial available through the PDA and through the opening screen of the game, to me it would have helped to see the pertinent tutorial as you encounter new actions. It’s probably not realistic to expect a younger player (or average impatient adult) to read through all of the tutorials before they jump into a new game.

I like that you have three save game slots to play with. Especially in families with multiple gamers, it’s so important for a game to allow more than one person to have their own save. So far it I haven’t needed it (though I’m not through the game yet), but it’s also sometimes helpful to be able to save the game prior to trying different courses of action — just in case you make a horrible error in judgment at some point. Multiple saves are great when you want to explore multiple options from a given point.

So far the puzzles have been reasonably easy to solve. Some have taken multiple tries — which the game kindly allows you to do (even after you’ve blown yourself up) but once you understand what you need to do, they aren’t that bad. While some of the puzzles could have used better instructions, maybe the point is that you’re supposed to be experiencing the puzzles as if you were the boys investigating a mystery. Mysteries don’t tend to come gift-wrapped with tidy explanations (except on network television, but I digress). The real trick to most of the puzzles is finding the object on the train, frequently unlocked by solving another puzzle first, that you need to solve your current puzzle. There is a lot of just moving from end to end of the train seeing if anything has changed and make sure to run the stylus over every square millimeter of the screen, just in case you missed something important.

One thing I don’t like is how much I need the PDA to know what to do next. Sometimes I’m supposed to wander the train until I run into someone to unlock something at a place I’ve just been — but I couldn’t interact with it because I didn’t do something else first. Sometimes I’m supposed to toss someone’s cabin for clues while they’re wandering the train. Sometimes you get a nudge in the right direction within the story while Frank and Joe talk to each other, but not always.

I would say the graphics are reasonably good in Treasure on the Tracks. Some of the areas really shine while other things, like the comic book conversations, are pretty basic. The train car with the Russian treasures is really worth having a nice look around. The music is fine, if a bit repetitive. There’s no voice dialog — it’s all done through text. The sound effects, like turning keys, seem just right.

One thing Treasure on the Tracks does that I’ve not really seen in other games is give actual historical tidbits of information in the course of gameplay. When you explore the cities on your stops, the tops screen often has some factual information about the location you’re visiting. So far this information hasn’t been essential to the game, but it is a nice inclusion and adds some flavor. Note — I mean the location information is accurate. The central mystery is made up and the survival of any of the Romanov children quite unlikely.

I’m mostly enjoying the game. I get a little tired of all the running back and forth. Even when I can see something that I want to investigate, I can’t do anything until I’ve done something else first. There’s nothing in the content that would make me not want to let my daughter play, but I just don’t think she’d get much out of the story. Even the Disney-fied version of the story — Anastasia — is a getting to be a few years old at this point. Do kids know anything about the Romanovs? I did enjoy the variety of puzzles. Some require quickness but not superhero reflexes. Some are logic. Some are putting torn paper back together correctly, and of course, there are the painting puzzles. It’s been a reasonable way to spend some gaming time, though having finished it, it’s not a game I would probably play through again. Once the mystery is solved, it’s solved.