The Smelly Mystery

Flowers smell like fish, orange juice smells like peanut butter, garbage smells like candy — it’s a malodorous mystery and you’re the detective in charge of the case.

Based on a Mercer Mayer book of the same title, The Smelly Mystery is an interactive storybook where a group of friends wake up from a sleepover to discover scents have been completely transformed. Little Monster and his assistant Detective Kerploppus are charged with identifying the culprit and fixing the smelly switch. Players gather clues on each page to solve the mystery.

This is a game that might have been featured in the weekly flyers from Scholastic that you brought home from school – or that your child pestered you to buy from one of those flyers! It’s easy to focus on the giant historically important games that need to be preserved; it’s also these smaller games, sometimes remembered only by the children who played them, that make up the wonderfully varied texture of the gaming world. In fact, an educational game was the beginning, decades ago, of DGM.

Playthrough options on The Smelly Mystery include “Play” to read the story and collect clues, “New” to restart the game with new clues and a new suspect, “Read” to read the story with no interaction, “Mug” for a face-building minigame, and “Page” to skip to a certain page of the storybook, view credits, and play game demos.

You can watch a full playthrough of the game (1.5 hours) here.

One day, we hope to play The Smelly Mystery using state-of-the-art scratch and sniff technology, but for now, you’ll have to use your imagination.

-Season

Gift of Don Apte – 2015.034.006