Game Review - Hogwarts Mystery

Game Review: Hogwarts Mystery by Portkey Games
Score: +13/-7 and FAIL

Update: Since I started playing, the game has worsened considerably. More and more crashes -- which of course leads to lost progress because of their inability to save progress in a timely manner. And inability to load your data, no thanks to "Facebook Login Error". Sometimes a few retries will see it connect successfully, but there have been reports of much longer outages, literally several days to weeks. With so many time-limited events, outages like this are especially frustrating.

You can just watch the game on Youtube or read it from the BlueMoonGame website (although here we found an excess of images and not all of them load, so Youtube may be more preferable).

Easily one of the best in category for Harry Potter / Wizarding World franchise games, Role Playing Games, and Casual Games. Yes, all three categories. Excellent overall game design, and it fits on your smartphone. (If you don't like squinting at your smartphone, you can also play it on your PC with Bluestacks.)

And it looks like it will be even more fleshed out with Hogwarts Legacy. Instead of a cartoonish side scroller, it'll be movie-quality atmosphere.

What Is Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery?

Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery is the first game in which players can create their own character and experience life as a Hogwarts student. The game will launch under Portkey Games, from Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, the games label dedicated to creating new Wizarding World mobile and video game experiences that place the player at the centre of their own adventure, inspired by J.K. Rowling’s original stories.

• Hits all the Harry Potter / Wizarding World nostalgia.
• +1 Not just iconic locations,
• +1 but you are walked through a similar experience as Harry Potter in the movies, one school year at a time.
• +1 You are immersed in the school and do things like flying on brooms and learning magic spells -- even tracing glyphs as a minigame so you feel you are actually spell casting.
• +1 There is effort to make these applicable outside of classes and in the story arc as well.
• +1  You engage in other "student" activities such as hanging out with your friends.
• -1 However these activities, notably "Meal with a Friend" and "Gobstones" are more like currency sinks because the attributes required to pass are so severe that unless you spend a lot of money accelerating your character development, it's almost pointless to try as you are likely to outright fail even if you answer correctly with online Hogwarts Mystery guides and get the best possible score.
• -1 Some of the animations really make you cringe. Like when you do well in a mini-game during a class and you and the professor smile at each other like overly infatuated lovers.
• It's made for hardcore fans.
• +1 Know-it-all fans of the books may have a chance at answering some of the quizzes and that gives them a rewarding feeling for their store of trivia about the Wizarding World. Everyone else will have to look up a walkthrough or just play multiple-choice-answer-lottery.
• But for overall game design, it's terrible. Given the prevalence of walkthroughs, this just encourages players to look up a walkthrough.
• It might be at least passable if the answers were at least mentioned in passing during the game, such as when you speak to various characters, even if the dialogs were optional.
• Some of the answers do appear in this way, but not all.
• Other answers show up as the game progresses and more dialogues become available as events / new classes / quests become available, but well after the question can appear to the player.
• Fortunately, after you choose an answer, the correct/best answer is revealed, so theoretically you shouldn't be failing the question more than once and this drawback is mitigated.
• -1 What is strange however, is that Q&A minigames typically involve attribute comparisons, and not having a high enough attribute will lose you points. So answering the same questions correctly may give you a pass now, but fail you later.
• It's clearly a game mechanic to slow your progress down, but it still fails the common sense test.
• +1 The story and activities are not primarily conflict driven.
• In most games, gameplay boils down to "You are quested by A to go to B and kill C to get D or perform E then come back to A". Or if you want to distill it even more, it's "Kill X fetch Y".
• Instead they carefully focus the action on what you learn in class, and interactions with other students.
• +1 Story cutscenes are one-time, but they added a "Memory" journal where you can replay them.
• However they did monetize this somewhat.
• +1 There's a solid attempt to let you roleplay with personality through conversation choices, to which you will get contextual replies according to what you choose. -1 However, it's thoroughly undermined by various mechanics.
• Some of these choices are locked by requiring certain attributes to be a certain minimum score, so actually you can't freely roleplay.
• And if you do have the required attribute minimum, you get a higher reward than choosing a no-requisite answer, so this puts pressure to NOT have a personality but play for maximum profit.
• While this is disappointing, it is also not uncommon in role-playing games. Choices have varying degrees of outcomes, and with pre-programmed outcomes, there's constant pressure to choose (e.g., read-ahead on a walkthrough / guide) what the player feels is the most favourable outcome.
• The best option would have been to not have any attribute prerequisite especially since the quest will progress the same way no matter what. Any reward could be provided at the end, and equal no matter what the player chose.
• There's no way to back out of a story conversation so that you can try to increase that score to say what you want to say. And even if you could, the process of actually increasing a score takes so much time, and ultimately it has little or no effect on story progress.
• -0 It's time-gated. Of course it is, as with most smartphone casual games.
• Predatory monetization of paywalls is the norm in smartphone games. What keeps them going is the fraction of players who are willing to sink literally thousands of dollars into a casual game.
• Instead of having you spend time actively doing repetitive quests that pay X amount because they are expected to take Y amount of time, casual games force you to wait Y amount of time passively to get X reward by making you pass that time waiting for "energy" to complete the task.
• It works out to be the same, except being passive tends to make people more bored and impatient, and thereby spend money to speed it up. That's one of the core revenue models and it's hard to fault them for doing what everyone else in the industry is doing to stretch out gameplay.
• What passive timegating also does is let you do other things with your time while you wait. Like writing this review for example.
• -1 CAUTION Many scenes involving the expenditure of energy are also time limited. If you don't plan ahead and start an activity while you are low on energy, you might not be able to complete it even if you used up the entire time limit.
• I'm almost inclined to call this as part of a "predatory monetization" scheme, except that many repeatable scenes (e.g., classes you re-take) only require a minimum amount of energy to pass with less-than-full rewards. But you still are considered to have passed. However...
• -1 CAUTION Some events are aggressively time-limited, and conveniently enough they sell you time extenders.
• This concept isn't unique among casual games (or even not-casual online games that regularly have events) but having played through a couple of these events, I feel the amount of time granted is really quite tight.in comparison with the casual pick-up-put-down-anytime game model of the regular game. 
• You have to do many scenes requiring lots of energy and frequently you need a full score to succeed.
• A typical scene would require accumulating 5 stars (50 energy units) with a 3 hour time limit.
• Energy recovers at 1 unit per 4 minutes, so 3 hours is only 45 units of energy, and you need 50. So you want to start a scene with a lot of energy -- or be willing to spend to make up the difference.
• The maximum amount of energy you can have banked is quite low; in the early game it might be around 100 minutes worth or not much more than that. If you somehow have exceeded this amount from reward sources, you cannot accumulate any at all from the passage of time.
• Furthermore, considering that this is marketed as a casual pick-up-put-down casual game, the overall tight time limit means you have to really check in regularly to complete one of these special events.
• These one-time events have a unique prize at the end which may or may not recur, so there's definitely FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) style monetization going on, even though ultimately you will not have your progress blocked by not having collected these items.
• The event-time-extension consumables  give you an insultingly little amount of time (possibly still not enough time) for the money you need to spend.
• +1 Fortunately the story is intriguing enough to make you want to keep moving forward.
• +1 Considerable quality of life improvements since even a year ago, and updated every couple of days with events. Probably to keep long-time players who've reached the end of the story playing, but for newcomers, this means a wealth of things to do.
• -1 CAUTION The game has a very delayed save of the status.
• Theoretically this is good if you wanted to back out of a bad decision by force-closing your game, but you don't know when it'll save or not save, and if you just close the app and go to sleep, you might be surprised next time you start it that you failed a task because you didn't complete it when in fact the game just didn't save your progress.
• I'm inclined to actually FAIL this game because of this issue but realistically it doesn't happen often that your game wouldn't have saved its status unless you are in the habit of force-closing your apps frequently or they happen to crash a lot (which Hogwarts Mystery rarely if ever does for me).
• Because of the uncertainty around this, I recommend that before you leave the app, do a manual save: Click your character portrait, then look at the lower right for a gear symbol to open the Options menu, and choose Save.
• +1 No pay-to-win player-versus-player.
• In fact, no real player-versus-player at all, which is typically a huge mistake for many games as it prompts complaints about pay-to-win and encourages players to find ways to cheat. This in turn creates headaches related to catching cheaters and moderating social media.
• What looks like PvP in duelling is actually you versus AI-controlled opponents.
• You know this because:
• They don't have to cast their duelling spells with minigames like you do --  otherwise their turns would take longer.
• Also, sometimes you get an "insight" into the spell they are about to cast. You get the exact spell, rather than the type of spell, which is what you would select first to determine who casts first.
• At best they are pulled from the player population, but being AI controlled means it is not true PvP and no better than randomly generated opponents.
• That said, there are a lot of paid alternatives to help progress, such as buying items that help improve your core stats and have an easier time with all aspects of the game.
• -1 There may not be 1-on-1 player-versus-player that is pay-to-win, but the recurring "Full Marks" bingo game is certainly pay-to-win for big spenders/whales to buy their way through the bingo board and get the outfit grand prize.
• You are randomly (?) placed with 24 other players and only the top scorer will get the cosmetic.
• Fortunately it is just cosmetic and cannot really affect anyone else's game.
• However if you are fashion-focussed or a collector, and you happen to be in a group with someone similar but willing to reach deeper into their pockets to outbid you, it can be really disheartening to never win.
• There's no telling when the costume will reappear in the game, so there's a lot of "fear of missing out" to make players spend.
• +1 Customer support through email seems quite fast, and you can expect an answer (not automated) in less than 24 hours. However their knowledge of the game seems low.