Mr. Success review
:: PARTIAL SUCCESSPrice: Free
Version: 1.0
App Reviewed on: iPhone SE
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Mr. Success is a spin-off game from hap Inc, creators of Hidden My Game by Mom. Instead of playing as a boy looking for his hidden game console though, you are a magician putting on a stage show. Mr. Success has a lot of the same humor and weirdness of hap Inc’s previous releases, but there are a couple puzzles in it that might make you want to put the game down before finishing it.
Drumroll please
In Mr. Success, each level starts just as your magician is about to perform a trick. By tapping, sliding, or swiping on certain parts of the scene, you can complete the feat before moving on to the next feat.
These tasks start out as pretty typical magic tricks. You bend a spoon without touching it, make birds fly out of your hat, etc. but as you continue, your tricks become weirder and weirder. What’s more is that each level can take just a few seconds to complete if you know what you’re supposed to do, making Mr. Success feel a bit like a WarioWare-type experience.
Magically bizarre
Mr. Success’s puzzles aren’t terribly complicated. In fact, many solutions are blatantly obvious and you just have to execute on the action to move things forward. Puzzle games without challenge are usually not particularly entertaining, but Mr. Success manages to stay interesting through its presentation and tone.
Much like the Hidden My Game by Mom games, Mr. Success has a visual style that’s reminiscent of an old safety manual that feels comically out of place for what you’re doing in the game. Your protagonist nonchalantly shrugs and smiles while doing anything from pulling a string of flags out of his mouth to catching baseballs, and this dissonance of style and content makes Mr. Success humorously fascinating.
Not so successful
Style carries Mr. Success a long way, but it can’t make up for the fact that a few of the game’s puzzles are downright infuriating. Specifically, a puzzle around dribbling a basketball and another involving a number sequence are so annoying that they may make you want to stop playing the game altogether.
Both of these puzzles are maddening for completely different reasons, too. On one, it’s plain to see exactly what you’re supposed to do, but the game’s controls make it really difficult to do. The other is just too obscure, making it pretty difficult to know what you’re supposed to do at all. In both of these situations, Mr. Success loses all of its momentum, and it’s at these times where the game feels its weakest.
The bottom line
I enjoyed my time with Mr. Success when I was blazing my way through the game’s 26 levels. As soon as I hit a puzzle roadblock though, the experience seemed less than ideal. Mr. Success seems to work better as a celebration of tone than an actual game, which is to say the experience isn’t very enjoyable when you’re put in a position where you have to figure out what you need to do to move forward.