Scooby-Doo Mystery is a Sega Genesis video game based on the long-running Scooby-Doo franchise. The game was developed by Illusions Game Company and published by Acclaim and Sunsoft, and belongs to the adventure genre, with a point-and-click interface.
The game is divided into two separate episodes (or "mysteries"), with no connection to each other. The first one is Blake's Hotel: Daphne's uncle owns a hotel that is being haunted by the ghost of a long dead Native American chieftain. The second one is Ha-Ha Carnival: a local amusement park is being sabotaged, and the main suspect is a ghost clown.
General tropes:
- Minimalist Cast: The player controls Shaggy, while Scooby wanders about the screen pointing to possible clues. The rest of the gang (Daphne, Fred and Velma) disappear off screen and only return in the mystery's resolution. Apart from them, the only characters that appear during the mystery are either a Red Herring or the Big Bad.
- Password Save: The game provides the player with overly long passwords full of letters and symbols. Some specific passwords lead directly to the finale of each mystery, and the player just has to perform a certain action to finish the game.
- Point-and-Click Game: Although it was developed for the Genesis and the player can use the 4-direction cursor to control Shaggy, the interface
is akin to a point-and-click game, with a section containing commands (like "use", "talk" and "take"), and an inventory space accessible via the "C" button on the controller.
Blake's Hotel shows the following tropes:
- Abandoned Mine: Behind the wine rack in the basement, there is an abandoned mine that leads further into a maze entrance.
- Bridge Logic: After a bear scratches its back on a nearby totem pole, the pole is struck down and serves as a makeshift bridge for Shaggy to access a small wharf with a fishing rod.
- Christmas: The mystery does happen in wintertime, and there are even Christmas lights decorating the front of the hotel (which are used as part of a puzzle later in the game). Otherwise, the season is incidental to the mystery at hand.
- Destroy the Evidence: In the kitchen, Shaggy spies through a peephole people in front of the fireplace, a fat man and a tall, thin man. The thin man gives the fat man a piece of paper, which the latter crumples and tosses it into the fire. The crumpled note is used to open the wine rack in the basement.
- Distressed Dude: Uncle Blake was captured by the villains and is being kept in a pillory, in a hole in the "The Dungeon" area, past the mine and the maze.
- Dumbwaiter Ride: During the chase sequence on the second floor, Shaggy and Scooby use a dumbwaiter as a hiding spot. The dumbwaiter is also used to access the back portion of the kitchen, where there are a fridge, the microwave and the oven.
- Expospeak Gag: Examining the snowman outside the hotel will prompt Shaggy to call it 'an accreted crystalline water homologue'. He also calls some gasoline 'liquid petroleum product'.
- Hell Hotel: Invoked by the villains. The hotel was not haunted at first, but sightings of a dead Native chieftain have begun to scare away the guests.
- Inconvenient Itch: Shaggy disturbs a hibernating bear with a heater, then uses a poison oak leaf on it. The bear becomes afflicted with a sudden itch and scratches its back on a nearby totem pole.
- Scooby-Dooby Doors: Scooby and Shaggy are chased by the ghost chieftain on the second floor. After this sequence, the door to the gardener's room, at the end of the hall, is open to explore.
- Secret Path: A secret trapdoor in Uncle Blake's office leads to the basement.
- Secret Underground Passage: In the hotel's basement, Scooby and Shaggy discover a hidden passageway behind a wine bottle rack.
- Shout-Out: The magic word used to activate the statue is 'XYZZY'.
Ha-Ha Carnival shows the following tropes:
- Amusement Park of Doom: The main setting of the mystery is an amusement park.
- Car Fu: More like bumper car fu: in a minigame, the ghost clown drives a bumper car against the player. The player must bump their car against the clown's and win the minigame.
- Distressed Dude: The carnival/amusement park's administrator was captured, placed inside a coffin in the Haunted House attraction, and wrapped in mummy bandages.
- Hall of Mirrors: Part of the amusement park setting and one of the places where the ghost clown appears.
- Hoist by His Own Petard: In the mirror funhouse, the player can use a mirror to frighten the ghost clown with its own reflection.
- Interface Screw: On the funhouse's spinning platform, the player's directional controls are inverted: "right" leads to the left exit; "down" to the middle exit; and "left" to the right one.
- Lost at Sea: Of a minor scale. Daphne, Fred and Velma are on a boat adrift just some miles away from the amusement park's wharf.
- Monster Clown: The main villain is a ghost clown.
- Spectacular Spinning: Inside the clown-faced funhouse, Shaggy and Scooby find themselves on a spinning wheel. Behind them, there are three exits: one leads to the bumper cars, another to the hall of mirrors, and the third to a mad scientist's laboratory with a sleeping Frankenstein's monster on a gurney.
- "Test Your Strength" Game: Right next to the beginning of the episode, a "test your strength" is available. Shaggy (the player) has to break the game by using a pole, since it is already rigged to begin with (by a hidden magnet).
