I’ve never really been much if a fan of Snoopy and the Peanuts comic strip. I do seem to remember owning a record of the Snoopy vs. The Red Baron song as a kid though and I loved it. Cradle Games and GameMill Entertainment bring you Snoopy & The Great Mystery Club and I’m reviewing it. But is it as good as the Snoopy vs. The Red Baron record?

“Join Snoopy and the gang in an all-new mystery adventure packed with charm, clever puzzles, and heartwarming friendships! Step into Snoopy’s paws and detective hat as you explore the town, solve challenging cases, and uncover hidden secrets—with help from the lovable Peanuts gang.”

While I may not be much of a Peanuts fan, I do enjoy a good detective game. Something to get the old noodle working as I search for clues and try to unravel a mystery. So, Snoopy & The Great Mystery Club sounds just like my sort of game… but it’s not. What you get here is a game split into four chapters, and each chapter has it’s own mystery to solve. Nothing major and as an example, one chapter has you trying to learn how and why kites have been going missing. It’s Snoopy, its all very child-friendly and Snoopy-like.

As you try to unravel these mysteries, you’ll cross paths with various other Peanuts characters like, (of course) Charlie Brown, Linus, Peppermint Patty, Marcie and Schroeder, to name a few. You control Snoopy (with Woodstock flying around) and some of these characters will be NPCs that ask you to preform tasks that will lead to a clue to help solve the mystery. Others will join your mystery club and follow you around. Now, as far as I can tell, the characters that do follow you around don’t seem to do anything, other than follow you around. There have their own little character sheets with attributes, strengths and weaknesses, and you can swap out members of the mystery club with any of the other characters that have joined. But, none of their character traits seem to make any difference to the game at all. Maybe some of the dialogue changes? I’m not sure. But from a gameplay perspective, it doesn’t seem to matter which characters you have in your group and their different attributes have zero effect on the game. So I’m not sure what the point is of swapping them out.

Anyway, taking place in a semi-open world map that you are free to explore, each of the four chapters are split into smaller quests that the NPCs will hand out. These never seem to be anything more than dozens and dozens and dozens of fetch quests. That’s it, fetch quests. One character will ask you to go somewhere and get an item for them, you bring it back. Another character will ask you to go somewhere and get and item for them, you bring it back. Rinse and repeat. There are even fetch quests within fetch quests. One NPC said that they needed some glue and told me where I could get it. So off I went to get the glue, when I got there, I was told that they don’t have any glue, but could male some if they had the ingredients. So I go and collect the ingredients to make the glue, take them back, get the glue, then take the glue back to the NPC that asked for it. A fetch quest within a fetch quest.

Keep doing these fetch quests (there are loads of them) and you’ll get a clue to the main mystery of the chapter. One you have all the clues (and several red herrings), you then have to pick four specific clues that lead to the solution of the mystery. There’s really very little detective work in this game called Snoopy & The Great Mystery Club that is about being a detective and solving mysteries. It’s a mass, multi-fetch quest game that tacks on a little detective element at the very end of a chapter.

Aside from the mass fetch questing, there is some variation. There are numerous mini-games/distractions. You can kick field goals with some American football practise. You can pitch some balls in baseball. You can ride/race a soapbox car. There’s a memory card game. And you can even fly against Snoopy’s nemesis, the Red Barron (no Snoopy vs. The Red Baron song though). As you progress through the game, these little distractions keep popping up (some of them tie into the main plot/mystery) and increase in difficulty. They’re fun little additions, but don’t really add much to the overall gameplay. You can also seek out Peanut comic strips and have a read of them.

Playing as Snoopy, as you progress through the game, you’ll unlock new outfits, each with their own unique skill/tool. There’s a detective outfit that will allow Snoopy to use a magnifying glass to seek out clues and follow footprints. The pirate outfit lets Snoopy dig. Dressing as a gardener gives Snoopy the option to use a leaf blower. There are other outfits each with their own skill/tool that you’ll need to solve the mysteries and reach the end credits. This does add a little variety to the game, but I found having to keep swapping between outfits to use a skill got a bit tedious after a while. Do the dozens upon dozens of fetch quests, solve the four mysteries and you’ve beaten the game. There is a ton (an absolute ton) of walking, backtracking and revisiting locations that you’ve just been to. I’m pretty sure that even the devs knew this would be annoying because there are a couple of times when the characters in the game point out all of the walking and how annoying it is.

Available now for PC and all the consoles, is Snoopy & The Great Mystery Club worth it? This is a tricky one to answer. It is clearly aimed at a younger audience, the simplicity of the gameplay is proof of that. I found it too simple and all the fetch quests began to grate before long. I do have two small children who have been getting into gaming, so I let them have a go to get their basic impression. Neither of them were particularly impressed and soon got bored, before asking if they could play Lego Marvel Super Heroes instead. Snoopy & The Great Mystery Club is not a terrible game, it’s just a bit dull and very repetitive. The detective/mystery solving is very shallow, the over reliance on fetch quests is draining. The mini-games do add a little variety, but not enough. I did like the multiple skills that Snoopy learns, I just got annoyed with all the costume changing to use them.

Maybe if you’re a massive Peanuts fan, you might get a bigger kick out of then than either I or my kids did. Maybe you’ll enjoy the world and references more, maybe you’ll overlook the overuse of fetch quests and shallow gameplay… maybe? I like the concept, I may not be a big Snoopy fan, but the idea of using the world of Peanuts to have this detective/mystery solving thing really suits the IP. It’s just that the gameplay is rather mundane, even for a kids’ game.