Carmen Sandiego is known as the international thief who steals valuable treasures around the world. But for her titular game, she’s the one hunting down the thieves. Join Carmen as she pursues villains from the organization VILE while working with her former team at ACME. Using various gadgets, she apprehends various thugs on her way to reach a mysterious mastermind. By gathering clues around the world, Carmen finds the mastermind and arrests them.
Carmen Sandiego is a detective simulation game from Gameloft. When VILE begins stealing forms of transportation like a stealth fighter jet, Carmen Sandiego wants to know why. With her ally Player assisting her with hacking and technology, she tries to foil VILE’s plans. ACME decides to enter into a reluctant partnership with Carmen due to their desire to also bring down VILE. This mission takes everyone around the world multiple times as VILE’s plans only get more nefarious.
It’s not hard to learn how to play and emulate Carmen’s thievery skills. Solving mysteries whose solutions change help prevent gameplay from becoming stale. Educational facts are sprinkled throughout your visits to well-known cities. The game isn’t too challenging even if some clues aren’t as helpful as they could be. Carmen Sandiego is a delight to play if you need a quick mystery game with educational content.
Despite VILE’s considerable resources and manpower, the story always stays child-appropriate. There are tense moments with suspense mixed in but nothing too dark ever appears. Carmen and the top members of ACME may be serious but no one is beyond a few jokes. This keeps the story lighthearted and fun while keeping some urgency. Even if it isn’t the most thrilling spy story, it’s decent enough to keep you playing.
Carmen Sandiego’s real draw is the mystery and puzzle gameplay. Carmen travels to various cities throughout the world to find VILE’s agent. However, the agent is rarely known to Carmen or ACME in the beginning. As you travel the world, you must investigate leads on VILE activity to find the mastermind’s identity and location. There is a time limit and if you run out, you must make an educated guess about the culprit.
Solving each mystery takes some detective work. You have organized places to examine clues, hints, and other information. Suspects are filtered out based on the criteria you learn from clues. Important spots are highlighted and you are notified if you have fully explored a location. This makes it easy for you to focus on finding clues and discovering the suspect’s identity.
The minigames are a nice diversion and lean into the master thief immersion factor. Carmen picks pockets, creates diversions, or thoroughly investigates a point of interest among other activities. Player also helps Carmen hack into locations though most of the cool spy stuff is her domain. The difficulty of the minigames is low to emphasize Carmen’s experience and why she’s working with Player. It also prevents the player from finding games too challenging and giving up early.
One of the unique selling points of Carmen Sandiego is that the villain isn’t someone you can catch without guesswork. Even if you play through once and identify the villain, that doesn’t mean they will assume that role in the second playthrough. Your suspect lineup can change and in optional adventures, your hints change too. This prevents complacency and ensures you get every clue to make a perfect deduction.
This all comes together to create a mystery game that is easy but has good replay value. You must pay attention to hints and clues if you want to improve your scores. Sometimes leads aren’t worth pursuing further or you make a mistake. Learning from each experience is a key part of gameplay and it makes each mission worth revisiting. Even the campaign villains can change, making you put your skills to the test.
I have two negative points for the mysteries, with the first one being the clues themselves. While some clues are obvious and you can test unreliable clues, some are naturally vague. For example, “hair like the color of a raven” doesn’t explicitly say that their hair is black. You also have “soaring above your fear” which means someone is afraid of flying. They aren’t useless but don’t point to obvious criteria. This can result in a clue looking like it’s useless even if it is reliable.
The second is the low difficulty. While it makes it easy to play, it becomes almost reflexive after some time. It’s difficult to skip ahead in missions because you must go through some motions to get the clues you need. Play too long and the game becomes too easy, almost making you wonder how Carmen is struggling to stay ahead. Appealing to a younger audience is great but may turn off older veterans of previous Carmen Sandiego games.
Carmen Sandiego is a solid detective game even if it is on the easy side. The educational content is a nice touch to the master thief persona, allowing you to learn as you go. Solving mysteries is fun and you truly immerse yourself into the role of a master thief. Gameplay may get repetitive after a while but in short bursts, it’s educational content you won’t want to miss.
Victor played Carmen Sandiego on PC with a provided review copy.
