Developed by Maxis Software and published by Asmik Ace Entertainment for the original Game Boy in 1991, Mysterium is an obscure first-person dungeon-crawler in which you play an alchemist’s apprentice exploring a maze – called the Mysterium – in order to complete a test.

Your task is to find and transmute a variety of metals and minerals in pools of acid, mercury, water, and in hot, burning pits. In doing so you convert them into useful items, such as keys, which you can then use to unlock doors and explore further into the maze, while also learning the alchemy trade.

Also high on your priority list is to survive against any hostile creatures you encounter, which means facing them and firing your weapon as quickly as possible to kill them before they damage you too much, or even kill you. Pressing the ‘A’ button toggles aiming on and off, and pressing the ‘B’ button fires your equipped weapon. If you’re smart enough you might also find an item that’ll transmute into a better weapon or even some armour… Experimenting; saving and re-loading quicksaves in a emulator, and keeping good notes, might help you deduct what transforms into what without too much delay, because the transformations are not random. Mysterium also has no built-in save function. Some items require transforming numerous times to get to a particular object. If you’re not patient enough for all of that malarkey you can always use a guide.

Your health is shown as a bar at the top of the screen and when it reaches zero you’ll lose one of your three available lives. You can heal by using White Roses that you find. When you lose a life you’re put back to the beginning of the level you’re on, but you do get to keep all the items you’re carrying. Only when you lose all three of your lives does the game fully end.

You’ll find torches that you can use to keep your visibility up (if you don’t the screen will ‘grey-out’ and it’ll become more difficult to see). Pressing Select brings up your inventory from where you can view, use or manipulate found items, and also view a map of the current level and character statistics.

Eventually you’ll find a pit, which is a chute leading to a lower level. Once you go down you won’t be able to return back up, so it’s worth collecting every item that you can from each level before leaving. That said: with limited inventory space you do need to sort the wheat from the chaff and drop anything you won’t need later, like scrolls and crystals that you’ve already read. Most other items can be transmuted, even keys.

As the game unfolds the ant-like Morda explains your true quest. Once you’ve mastered alchemy you then have three other tasks to complete: 1. rescue a civilization of giants, 2. find Cadmia, the apprentice who explored the Mysterium before you, and disappeared, and 3. kill the dragon that’s guarding the ancient temple at the bottom of the maze.

Mysterium is a really basic and blandly-presented game that feels like it had potential, but the developers didn’t really exploit it fully. The maze graphics are woefully inadequate and little attempt has been made to create a creepy atmosphere with shading and lighting effects. Yes, the outlines of the maze, and everything else on screen, do fade out as your torches burn out, but that really isn’t good enough. The game looks decidedly amateurish and could easily have been improved with better graphics. Most of the monsters look pathetic… The music isn’t bad, but could really have done with being more evocative of the situation. Gameplay-wise, Mysterium is absorbing to some degree, but lacks excitement. The devs could easily have taken a leaf out of Dungeon Master‘s book and made the combat more interesting. As it stands it’s just perfunctory.

I’m split about Mysterium. On the one hand it looks pretty bad and lacks atmosphere, but on the other hand it’s easy to play, does have a coherent structure, and somewhat interesting gameplay. Part of me wanted to play on and complete the game, and another part of me couldn’t wait to move on and play something else… The game is the same every time you play it, though (there’s no randomisation I believe), so once you’ve completed it you’re unlikely to want to play through it again.

More: Mysterium on Wikipedia