Play Mysterium Online

Mysterium came out for the Game Boy in 1991, developed by Asmik Corporation. It was part of that wave of early handheld games that tried to do something a little different, something that wasn't just another port of an arcade hit. You don't control a spaceship or a hero in armor here; you're an alchemist, and the screen is your cluttered workshop more than a battlefield.

You guide your robed character through a single, large dungeon viewed screen by screen, but your main tool isn't a sword. It's transformation. You pick up items like iron bars or old bones and use your alchemy to turn them into something useful, like a fragile glass key or a potion. The goal is to find and assemble the pieces of a mystical artifact, which means a lot of backtracking and experimentation as you figure out what combination of items will affect which obstacle or creature. The pacing is slow and thoughtful; it's a puzzle game dressed in adventure clothes. It feels like solving a complex riddle where you wrote half the clues yourself.