I played Detective for the first time tonight, just the first case, and I think it might actually be…awful?
I’ve never played another game like this, so I have no context from whatever the Sherlock game is some of you mentioned. Maybe this is a whole genre I’m never going to like, I don’t know. I’m not going to spoil any of the actual case at all, and I’ll keep the mechanics of it vague too.
First of all, yes, the writing is painful. A whole lot of it is truly filler that you can just skip, and what’s left is a lot of dry info dumps, with only the occasional bad writing that’s also important. So I can live with it, but I would rather it not be badly written, certainly.
When it comes to finding information it feels like it’s mostly luck. Maybe the three of us were bad enough we don’t even realize what we were doing wrong, and people who are truly better “detectives” than us would come away feeling like it made sense, but that wasn’t my impression. I don’t feel like I learned anything by the end of the game about better ways to make decisions.
As a co-op game, it’s co-operative in the same way trying to pick a restaurant with your friends is co-operative. Everyone’s just making their case for what we should do next, but there are no game mechanics in play to govern anything. It’s just about reasoning, arguing, and talking through what you know and what you think. And in light of my last paragraph, what’s the point? We didn’t slowly work out a logical approach to our investigation, we didn’t come to realize any of us were particularly good at sniffing out the right leads to pursue. It mostly just came down to very basic guesses about the worth of particular narrative threads, and some obvious attempts to manage our in-game time (the ultimate limit on the scope of your investigation). If you’re all clueless (like us), you’re all clueless; and if one of you turns out to have some insight into how this game works, I can’t think of anything for anyone else to contribute.
Finally, the longer I thought about our game, the less I understood why it’s a table-top game at all. Their website is absolutely required for some of the logging, tracking, and occasionally revealing of evidence, and ultimately how your completed investigation is judged.
For what it does provide, it’s frustratingly inadequate. It’s hard to easily compare information–profiles of people, for example. If I find out someone said so-and-so was 5’6", I just have to click back and forth between the web pages for the people we’ve discovered one at a time to remember if anyone we’ve already encountered fit that description. In that regard, it would literally be easier if there were just physical cards you were given for the people of interest so you could spread them out on the table, or even better, pin to a bulletin board and start connecting with red yarn. The game encourages you to write things down, but it feels simultaneously silly and necessary to essentially copy the information down verbatim from your website database to have any hope of easily referencing it.
On the flip-side, many of the physical parts of the game seem like busy work when there’s a website right there tracking this stuff. You’ll draw a card that will tell you to enter some codes into the site as a result to “enter” that evidence or information into your databases, which, okay, fine, whatever, that works if I don’t think about it for very long. But other times, you’ll have an option to investigate that is an action you initiate through the site, which then tells you to draw a card, which then has a code you turn around and enter back into the site. WHY? It was around then that it slowly started to occur to me there’s no good reason for any of the physical components of this at all.
Everything is completely deterministic, so why are you telling me to fish card number-whatever out of this deck at all? Why isn’t this entire thing happening through a (better designed and organized) website?
I understand you could stretch that question to really apply to any board game, but it felt like a pretty legitimate question here after an hour or two of thinking about it.
And as a final note on the website aspect of it, I suspect you will be very frustrated if you only have one laptop or tablet or whatever. All three of us ended up with our laptops out at the end (as many people as you’d like can be logged into your instance of the game) because it’s much too cumbersome for one of us to drive with everyone else wanting to jump back to a different file or scroll up–no wait, back down–etc. I suppose you could use your phones too, though that’s going to be a little tedious in its own way.
So yeah, this didn’t work very well for me. I would not recommend it. However, I am curious enough about it that since one of us already owns us, and we’ve already gone through one case, we might as well give it another case or two to see if it grows on us.
Finally, a question for anyone who has played it. We failed our first case.
When you fail, you’re given two choices for what to do next time: “reset” the case (in the website) and replay it, or accept the failure and move on to the next one. It’s unclear what’s at stake here though. I realize this may be hard to answer without spoiling anything, but can someone give me a vague idea of how much these cases build on each other? Is it “bad” to move forward with a blown first case, are we going to make an already confusing game even worse as we continue? That’s my fear on one hand, but on the other hand, replaying the case feels sort of counter to the spirit of the game. There are plenty of aspects of the investigation we don’t know anything about, but the things we did do on our first playthrough, we know will play out exactly the same way next time. Any recommendations from other detectives out there?
