Regulating and controlling the wizarding world’s magical creatures is a big job, which is exactly why the Ministry of Magic has enlisted Muggles to help track down some fantastic beasts that are wreaking havoc across London and beyond. From the Leaky Cauldron to the Chudley Cannons’ practice pitch, the magical community is teeming with beasts that have to be identified and captured.
In new mobile game Fantastic Beasts: Cases from the Wizarding World, players work with Ministry employees from the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures to find clues and deduce which beasts are responsible for injuring Quidditch players or damaging Leaky Cauldron property.
The game tasks players with picking specific clues out of a scene, but Harry Potter fans will recognize plenty of the game’s elements — things like the Remembrall and Skele-Gro, along with pints of Butterbeer and Chocolate Frogs. In the course of gathering clues, players compile case files on each beast in question, using evidence to identify and track down the creatures, be they Hippogriffs, Occamys, or Bowtruckles.
Theres also a fair amount of puzzle-completing and spell-casting in the game along with the occasional quips from your Ministry colleagues. But the entire raison d’être of the game is immersion in the wizarding world, and that comes from all of the little things that come together to make the world feel complete, like something we’d recognize from the books and films.
“We spent a lot of time at the Warner Bros. Studio Tour London in Leavesden to get in a lot of little references,” Mary Casey, director of product at WB Games told Pottermore. “Everything from Bertie Bott’s to Butterbeers. The things I like are more the everyday stuff like someone selling vegetables in a Hogsmeade street, just the day-to-day life of the wizarding world.
The mobile game is available now for iOS and Android. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them arrives in theaters November 18.
