The Case of the Mixed-Up Shymer

The Case of the Mixed-Up Shymer starts with a wonderfully daft problem: Sherlock Holmes is away, you are his secretary, and nursery rhymes have gone wrong on the island of Nursree. Children are rioting because their stories no longer end as they should, so you step in to put famous rhyme characters back on track. It is a premise with enough cheek to carry a text adventure through its slower stretches.

Its puzzles ask you to think literally about familiar verses, such as finding a way to make Humpty Dumpty break after he falls. That can be charming when the wordplay lands and irritating when your phrasing does not match the parser’s expectations. At 6.9, it is an agreeable oddity for patient interactive-fiction fans, especially anyone who enjoys old-school typing and nursery-rhyme nonsense.

Retro Replay Review

Gameplay

You begin not as Holmes but as his secretary, left to field a new call while the detective is occupied elsewhere. That small reversal gives the game an immediate comic hook: you are taking on a case that sounds beneath the world’s greatest detective, yet the situation on Nursree is serious enough in its own silly way. The nursery school children are in uproar because the rhymes are wrong, and your job is to make them come true again.

This is a traditional text adventure: the game describes your surroundings and you type commands in response. Progress comes from exploring, meeting nursery-rhyme characters, and working out how to restore their expected fates. The best puzzles come from taking a line you know by heart and looking at it as a practical problem. Humpty Dumpty falling without breaking is funny on its own; realizing that you need to arrange the missing “break” is the kind of literal-minded joke the game wants you to play along with.

That approach gives the game a clear, pleasing puzzle language once it clicks. Instead of treating the nursery-rhyme setting as mere decoration, it asks you to actively repair it. Still, the format demands patience. You will be typing rather than selecting from a modern menu, so experimentation and careful wording are part of the challenge. If you enjoy poking at a strange fictional world with short commands and following a chain of wordplay, that friction feels like part of the investigation. If you want fast feedback and generous guidance, it can become a roadblock.

The Case of the Mixed-Up Shymer — screenshot 1

Graphics

This is text only. You read descriptions of the places around Nursree and type your actions, so the characters and their skewed nursery-rhyme predicaments have to take shape in your head rather than through drawn scenes or animation.

The Case of the Mixed-Up Shymer — screenshot 2

Story

The Case of the Mixed-Up Shymer wisely does not overcomplicate its setup. Holmes being absent gives the secretary a reason to take charge, while the island’s broken nursery rhymes give every encounter a shared comic purpose. It is a light detective frame for a series of fairy-tale-shaped problems, not a weighty Holmes mystery.

The joke works because the crisis is both absurd and easy to understand. A rhyme being “wrong” is a tiny disaster in ordinary life, but for Nursree’s children it has escalated into a riot. You are entering a world where the expected ending matters, and every correction nudges it back toward the version everyone knows.

That makes the game best when you bring some affection for the material it is twisting. Familiarity with nursery rhymes lets you anticipate what is out of place and turns the solutions into punchlines. The Sherlock connection is a neat framing device, but the real personality comes from the contrast between detective-business seriousness and gleefully childish rhyme logic.

Overall Experience

There is something endearing about how directly The Case of the Mixed-Up Shymer commits to its silly idea. The first hour’s pull is not suspense or action; it is the urge to see which rhyme has been mangled next and how the game expects you to set it right. When you solve one of its literal nursery-rhyme problems, the result feels less like cracking a hardboiled case than getting the punchline to a joke.

Its age and text-only format are not incidental. You need to enjoy reading descriptions, mapping out what you have learned, and trying commands until the game understands your intention. Frustration is most likely to set in when you have the right general idea but cannot phrase it in the way the parser accepts. A patient mood, and perhaps a willingness to revisit clues from the rhymes themselves, goes a long way.

For the right gamer, the payoff is a compactly odd piece of interactive fiction with a genuinely playful premise. It earns its 6.9 through charm and puzzle-minded humor rather than polish or narrative ambition. Give it a chance if you like classic typed adventures and find the thought of repairing broken nursery rhymes more inviting than ridiculous; otherwise, its deliberately old-fashioned pace will be hard to warm to.