Review by: Neilie Johnson

During its storied history, the U.S. has been subject to more than one British Invasion and in the last few years, the gaming industry has seen one of its own. Titles like Professor Layton and the Curious Village, Henry Hatsworth and the Puzzling Adventure and even The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom have proven the viability of utilizing a romantically old-fashioned, specifically (or vaguely) British sensibility to make games. U.K. based social game developer Relentless Software, makers of the Buzz!: The Music Quiz series, is hoping to add to the trend with their six part mystery series, The Blue Toad Murder Files.

Blue Toad is a 1-4 player episodic adventure/puzzle game wherein each player takes on the role of one of four agents from the Blue Toad detective agency: a bookish girl, a smarty-pants boy, a spry old lady and a middle aged man with a walrus mustache. Whomever you choose, at game start you've landed in the idyllic town of Little Riddle where you plan to take a vacation from your investigative duties. Your vacation meets an untimely end however, when a prominent villager also meets an untimely end at the hands of a mysterious murderer.

An old pro at crime solving, you immediately get down to hunting the murderer by getting to know the townsfolk and riling up the local police inspector. All three episodes of Blue Toad are vaguely reminiscent of the Professor Layton games, alternating between exploration and puzzle play. Each episode presents a unique crime to solve and for each one, a certain number of suspects are named who you then must interview in order to uncover important clues and undermine their alibis.

The puzzles in Blue Toad appear as tasks (in true adventure game form, most people refuse to talk until you do something for them) and they come in a wide variety, including word puzzles, shape recognition, observational puzzles and riddles involving numbers and logic. Doing them is somewhat like taking an I.Q. test, but considerably more fun. All puzzles are timed, which ups the tension, but the good news is, you have an unlimited number of chances to solve them. Once you've solved a puzzle, you're given a ribbon—gold, silver or bronze—depending on your time and the number of mistakes you've made while solving it. If you get a puzzle wrong, you can keep trying it indefinitely or even choose “Give Up” (although this does affect your score at the end). If a puzzle totally has you stumped, giving up isn't necessarily bad because the game shows you the solution, thus preparing you to solve any future similar puzzles.

In between puzzles, you wander the village, visiting places like the Town Hall, the Library, the Doctor's office and the Jeweler, talking to the rather unusual inhabitants of Little Riddle. These peculiar people not only provide you with information about the crime, they give you insight into the town's history and in their weirdness, are good for a laugh or two. At the end of every episode, after weighing all the evidence, you'll be asked to choose a suspect and scored depending on both your choice and your puzzle-solving prowess.