Scooby Doo Mystery (SNES) Review

Those meddling kids Shaggy, Scooby, Fred, Daphne and Velma are back at it again and this time it’s on the SNES. Scooby Doo Mystery is an exploration adventure game where you get to control both Shaggy and Scooby. The game starts you off where the gang is driving around the mystery machine on their way to the area.

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The four areas you get to play in are:

Spooky Shipwreck Where you’ll hunt down a ghostly pirate named "One-Eyed Matt".

An Amusement Park that is being haunted by an Evil Clown.

A Spooky Swamp being patrolled by The Tar Monster that’s scaring everyone away.

And a Denny’s that’s haunted by an zombie waitress. The waitress is biting each of the customers and turning the whole town into zombies. Nah I’m just kidding, the last stage is actually Bradshaw Manor A Mansion that belongs to Daphne's Uncle which is being haunted by an evil vampire named Count Bagosi.

You’ll get to walk around sniffing around for clues by holding the X button. When Scooby stumbles on a clue, press up to put it in your inventory. This is where the rest of the gang comes into play.

Pressing the select button will cycle through your inventory. Press the R button when next to Velma and she’ll grab the clue from you occasionally unlocking new areas.

If you speak to speak to Daphne, she’ll give you a Scooby snack. Freddy comes into play occasionally as well towards the end where he’ll design a trap to catch each of the villains to complete each stage.

I like how the gang actually play roles in the game. They’re not just standing around as part of the background even though they are just standing around and occasionally moving when you progress to a new area.

You can hold B to Jump, Y to Run and A to throw a weapon at an enemy. You have a couple weapons where you can throw a trolley, swing a hammer, throw a can or a coconut right at an enemies face. The enemies in Scooby doo mystery are pretty underwhelming. Ohhhh a scary pumpkin oh a rat! At least they tried a little better with the Zombie.

You can also bring up your map by pressing the L button. Sometimes you might get lost with the different sections of the game trying to find one of the gang members and this comes in handy.

As you search around each of the levels looking for clues, you’ll unlock new areas that you can explore . Find all the clues and you’ll have Fred outline the trap blueprints. The blueprints are absolutely outrageous.

There’s also two bonus levels hidden in each mystery. The first is found in kitchen areas. In this level, the player moves Scooby, from side to side, catching food items that Shaggy is throwing from the refrigerator onto slices of bread.
The second is found randomly in each level, but usually appears upon entering a new area of the level. On this level, Shaggy plays a game of "Whac-A-Mole" with a mallet on three vases.

Being an exploration game, Scooby Doo mystery does well at exploring. Some of the clues were right in front of you but overall you have to sniff around, occasionally getting spooked by enemies. The health system is actually in reverse. If the health meter fills up, you’ll lose a life. This is where you can use the Scooby snack to reduce the fright-0-meter.

Argonaut software gets the graphical design correctly in Scooby Doo Mystery. Fred, Velma, Daphne, Shaggy and Scooby all look great and match their appearances from the show.

Being a Scooby doo game, it’s clearly aimed towards kids and it shows. All of the items are in the same spot which makes the gameplay quite boring at times. If you’ve finished a stage and try to replay it, everything is exactly where you would expect them to be. There’s also not much variety other than the awkward platforming sections where you got to jump onto platforms that carry you from one section of the map to another. I found these sections extremely difficult to get used to, often leading to falling or dying.

One other glaring hole here is that there isn’t the actual Scooby Doo theme song anywhere in the game. The music itself is a bit generic but does keep with the theme of finding clues throughout the game.

There’s also a password system that you can use to progress through each stage. I’ll leave each of them in the description as well as on screen now.

I had this game as a kid and grew up watching the Scooby Doo TV show. I had a blast playing through this. It’s simple, it follows the TV show accurately and isn’t very difficult. I would recommend Scooby Doo Mystery to anyone who has kids that are into the TV show.