CHENNAI: In an age where we play strategic and cooperative mobile games like PUBG, which never has a dearth of players, when the processing speeds of phones are like never before; enters an ancient game with farm-ville style incentives. As Potterheads, it is our moral obligation to stand by any official release of the fandom, and so I’ll try to do it justice.
We appreciated Pottermore’s exploratory adventure, we grudgingly accept Johnny Depp as Grindelwald, and we are even ready to forgive the Cursed Child plot holes. All that was left now, was for the creators to make a nice smartphone game of the Potterverse that will keep us occupied till the next big event in the fandom. They heard us. And so, the secrets of the Hogwarts mystery are being revealed. And we realise that they aren’t really that exciting and the memes making fun of this new game is what unites the fandom in these hard times.
The game started out enthusiastically enough — we get a letter to Hogwarts, pick our own username (it doesn’t allow for joke names, but I managed to name my character Hippo Griff), allow our wands to pick us, and choose our own houses too! I thought to myself “Aah, I shall be a pro at this.
I will finish the game before the world does and review it and create its wiki!” But this was before I noticed those cursed energy bars at the top right corner of my phone’s screen.
Initially, you would assume that the most challenging task is to perfect the on-screen wand movements. But you are ready to go through that seemingly gruelling task in the hope of finding Easter eggs on the Harry Potter books and enjoy interactions with characters you know well. But the energy bars on top should have warned you as the aim of this game was never to provide you an insight into your favourite fandom. It was never to show you cool secrets at Hogwarts. They want to teach us real-world patience (in-game patience is waiting for energy to restore) — patience to hope and wait for a better official Harry Potter game.
