The good thing about the iOS is that it lets old games that may have been underrated during its initial release to be resurrected as a solid title worthy of notice. Touch Detective is one such game that has been given another chance by the App Store. Known as Mystery Detective in Europe, this point-and-click adventure game by BeeWorks has a certain charm to it that made it a viable candidate for reincarnation. Surely, it must have been made better after five years of contemplation and hindsight.

Aside from the obvious use of the touch interface as cited by the name, the game has nice quirky comic style, featuring cute bug-eyed characters with clean and solid lineart and light tones. This cartoonish look compliments the overall presentation style of the game, and complimented by the equally amusing soundtrack. You may get a lite version with the first chapter for free, but the full version does have the whole storyline and some exclusive content that may be enticing enough for you to cough up some loose change for it.

It’s nice that if you want to give it a try, you actually have the option to try it out first, which is quite thoughtful of the developers and distributors of Touch Detective. This is especially so with the progression of the story being well done, letting you follow each character’s development as it goes along. The dialogue and narrative are quite entertaining, letting you get into the whole premise of chasing down a criminal who steals other people’s dreams. Maybe this is something like “cute noir”, which is a charming label to fit into this title. At the very start, you can really see that it’s going to be a good game, or so it seems.

What sets this game back though is what makes it work as a point-and-click in the first place, which is the interactive parts of the game. There aren’t a lot of hints that let you progress well enough, even if you have an IQ of over 130 or so. BeeWorks’ version of Where’s Waldo? has its novelty wear off pretty fast once you get frustrated with the blatant pixel hunting that can only be made sense of quickly through some machinegun screen tapping. There despite five whole years to think about it, they haven’t really done anything to add some finesse to the game.

What could’ve been a marquee title for the genre in the App Store became more like a scheme to get a bit more revenue out of the game without fixing the flaws that made it flop in the first place. If anything, people may only get the lite version for the visual style, which is the only silver lining in this dark and rather ominous cloud. It’s like an alcoholic father who came back from rehab, only to go back to the bottle and tangle the whole family up with his anger issues all over again.

It’s a sad display indeed as a mobile adventure game. It looks good as a visual presentation, but shallow as a game on its own.