Wow, that’s a mouthful of a title! Anyway, Von Sottendorff is a rich aristocrat baron who has gone a little cuckoo in his mansion.  Help him reclaim his sanity by solving puzzles and exploring his mysterious abode in this downloadable action-puzzler game for Nintendo 3DS.

You can make the baron walk and jump in each 3-D room and zoom the camera in and out. When you zoom the camera all the way out, you can shift each room around like one of those sliding picture puzzles.  You can travel to room to room this way, just as long as there is a door that connects them.  Each room in the house has puzzles that you solve, represented by paintings. Each painting has another set of rooms for each level.  To solve a level, you must collect a key to unlock the main double door exit, and you must also pick up a puzzle piece that’ll reveal a picture to help the baron regain his memory and sanity.

Aside from running and jumping, you can also make the baron blow his trumpet, which reveals hidden blocks somehow. But don’t blow the trumpet too much as you only have a limited number of toots, but you can refill them by finding hidden trumpet icons in the rooms.  Other things to collect in the levels are photos, which you can use to purchase concept art, music, and videos in the extras section.  And paper hats you gather count as lives, I think.  I’m not really sure because this game really doesn’t have a very good in-game instruction manual, which is a shame since it’s a downloadable title only.  Also watch out for enemies like rats, bats, and walking suits of armor.  You can stomp on their heads to stun and defeat them, but it’s just as easy to avoid them altogether.

This game actually reminds me of one of the dungeons in The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. Any of you who have played through that game, you remember the last dungeon had rooms that you could reach by sliding a picture puzzle around.  Well that’s what this whole game is like.  Aside from the lack of a good in-game instruction manual, the only other problem I had with the game is it can be a little hard to visualize which rooms you can connect and walk through, partly due to the limited camera angles.  It’s still a clever game; it just gets very difficult rather quickly.  But if you like brain-busting puzzles, you may want to check it out anyway.

Kid Factor:

Nothing too terribly violent here. If you defeat an enemy or they get you, you or they will just disappear and your character says, “Oh!”  Even though there is lots of spoken voice, reading skill is still helpful for some of the text and menus.  Because of the complexity and difficulty of the puzzles, I’d say this game would be best enjoyed by older kids.  The Delusions of Von Sottendorff and his Square Mind is rated E for Everyone.

Tags: Game Reviews