App of the Week: Missing

The App: Missing, http://market.android.com/details?id=jp.co.sic.missing 

The Good: Missing is an ostensibly straightforward puzzle game. You are trapped in a room, and the goal of the game is to find objects in the room and use them to escape, like finding a key and using it to open a cabinet door to find pliers, which make a coat hanger into a hook that can be used to grab inaccessable objects. Challenging, and works well with a few exceptions (see section below).

The Bad: The graphics are fairly primitive. (For most of the game it's tolerable, but there's one point where a gap [I think] in a drain channel looks like a chunk of concrete wedged in the channel. Not a problem until you consider that the procedures to fill a gap and break out a chunk of concrete are very different.) Some puzzles must be solved in a certain order or you will be unable to progress, but there is no mechanism to prevent you from accidentally solving puzzles in the wrong order. Some of the puzzles are very hard and there are no hints whatsoever. There is nothing to indicate which places you can take closer looks at, so in the widest view you are left tapping randomly on the screen hoping to hit something important. The English captions of cut scenes, help pages, etc. is awkward although understandable (it looks to me like it was written by someone who does not speak English as a first language).

The Bottom Line: For free, it's a very entertaining little game that ought to be entertaining to fans of puzzle/RPG games like the Nancy Drew series. I wouldn't pay for it, and I would thoroughly try out the free demos of the sequels before paying money for them, though.