Castle – Never Judge a Book By Its Cover Review

It's a bit rough round the edges (and the inners) at times, but Castle – Never Judge a Book By Its Cover should keep both fans of the show and hidden object enthusiasts pretty happy. It's like a slightly inferior CSI game in its approach, providing more than just scenes of random items.

Divided up into chapters, you explore various crime scenes while attempting to figure out just what happened to the victim and solving a variety of puzzles. At times you'll be combining items from your inventory to unlock certain areas, while at others you'll be solving puzzles. The puzzles are a bit of a messy bunch in that some can be ridiculously easy to figure out, then you're suddenly thrust into a much harder conundrum. There's always a skip button but hey, who wants to give in to that?

Despite those difficulty curve issues, Castle – Never Judge a Book By Its Cover keeps things reasonably snappy. It never takes long to move onto something new and it's quite varied. Sometimes you'll be interviewing suspects and have to match up clues with locations before interrogating them, which is more interesting than a hands-off approach. Hidden object scenes are quite varied too, with a mixture of typical objects as well as ones that must be uncovered through combining items. You always feel like you're moving forward, and each chapter is just the right length for a casual game.

Such variety is what makes Castle – Never Judge a Book By Its Cover a success. It has a few quirks, like that difficulty spike and occasional issues with being able to see hot spots clearly, but it's mostly quite fun – whether you've watched the TV show before or not.