Staffer Retro: A Supernatural Mystery Quest from GamePia and Team TetraPod brings us a new classic-style adventure game on Nintendo Switch. Check out our Staffer Retro: A Supernatural Mystery Quest review!

 

Staffer Retro: A Supernatural Mystery Quest from GamePia and Team TetraPod brings us a new classic-style adventure game on Nintendo Switch. You’ll be placed in the role of Verita, a girl who lives at a second-hand store where, every now and then, some interesting items pop up. It is while at Shop Retro that she finds a Staff with a rather peculiar aura. Since you’re sorta under a ton of debt, you think about selling the Staff so that you can make ends meet… and that’s when you realize there’s more to this item than what is first apparent.

Staffer Retro: A Supernatural Mystery Quest is the follow up to Staffer Case: A Supernatural Mystery Adventure, which was released on the Nintendo Switch last year. For this new experience – featuring voice acting in Japanese and text in English, Japanese, French, German, Korean, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese – you’ll be learning more about Verita and the world around her, bringing us a different protagonist than the one from the prequel.

After activating the Staff, you’ll need to explore each area and talk to everyone to find the right documents and information needed to progress further and further. It’s thanks to your actions and the conclusions that you draw from the documents you procure that you’ll be able to reach one of the different endings that the game has to offer.

 

The truth is most certainly out there, and you will need to find what happened before so that you can better understand the supernatural events that you’re witnessing. You’ll have to sort through six different types of documents to locate the clues that will point your investigation in the right direction.

Instead of collecting items that you can then use to solve a puzzle here and there, you’ll be required to explore, discuss, and deduce, adding documents to your inventory, which you can open up by pressing the L button. You’ll get to learn the basics during the game’s intro gameplay sequence after you get to meet Verita, her sister, Vero, as well as their dad. Verita’s father is currently talking to a customer, and it’s now up to her to discuss with said customer to learn more about her and what is needed.

When you select the discuss option, you’ll be given the chance to talk with her to learn about her complaints. It turns out she sold a very old book last week at Retro. The book was The Dark Side of the Moon, and she’d like to buy it back by paying back the full price she sold it to the store… and thus lies her current predicament.

You see, even if your father agreed to sell the book back and recover the money he paid for it, Retro has already sold The Dark Side of the Moon to someone else! She asks that you let her know who bought The Dark Side of the Moon so that she can find them and pay them for the book, but that’s certainly very difficult to do! One can’t just simply go around giving away the private information of one customer to another.

That’s when you learn the reason why she wants to recover that particular copy of The Dark Side of the Moon: she has found out that it was her grandmother’s keepsake, and it’s the last object she has to remember her by. You realize this is a very important item with high sentimental value, so you decide to review the ledger to find who bought The Dark Side of the Moon. Most customers are, after all, people from the neighborhood, so odds are they will understand.

You’ll then need to use the left analog stick to select a clue from the left side of the screen to bring it into one of the two available blank spots on the right side of the screen. One spot will be for the buyer’s name, while the other one will be for the buyer’s location. This is when you’ll have to deduce the right information. Last week, one customer bought a record, another one bought a book, one bought a doll, and the last one purchased a hat. As you’ve probably guessed by now, the info you need is the one from the person who bought a book. If a combination is successful, you’ll be able to carry forward.

This is as far as I’ll go, since I don’t want to spoil this adventure for you, but rest assured it’s an interesting one to take for a spin from start to finish. Yes, the game is not going to be for everyone. Yes, it’s a bit more slow-paced than other similar-style games. Yes, there are some mistakes in the localization. Yes, the soundtrack feels a bit repetitive. No, this does not mean you should skip this game.

Staffer Retro: A Supernatural Mystery Quest brings us a new classic-style adventure game on Nintendo Switch. You’ll be placed in the role of Verita, a girl who lives at a second-hand store where, every now and then, some interesting items pop up. It is while at Shop Retro that she finds a Staff with a rather peculiar aura. Since you’re sorta under a ton of debt, you think about selling the Staff so that you can make ends meet… and that’s when you realize there’s more to this item than what is first apparent. Will you be able to learn what is really going on? Staffer Retro: A Supernatural Mystery Quest is out on Nintendo Switch with a $24.99 price tag. If you want to try before you buy, you can go and check out the game’s demo straight from the Nintendo eShop.

Disclaimer
This Staffer Retro: A Supernatural Mystery Quest review is based on a Nintendo Switch copy provided by Team TetraPod.