Took me 13 hours to complete everything.
After this review, I’m in. I’ll be playing it first solo, but hopefully playing with other players where I take the role of the chisel. I’ll post impressions.
I just remembered that Sherlock Holmes Chapter One is getting released on Tuesday. Haven’t found any reviews yet, guess the embargo is tight again… There are a couple of previews around and it sounds relatively interesting:
When it comes to crime solving, Sherlock Holmes Chapter One does not mess around. Whether I was investigating a crime scene, interviewing a person of interest, or drawing conclusions that would determine someone’s guilt or innocence, Chapter One absolutely never held my hand. If I missed some critical pieces of evidence and accused the wrong person? Oh, well! An innocent man goes to prison and I get to walk around thinking I’ve delivered justice. If I found someone committed murder but decided to let them go free anyway? That was totally my prerogative. This complete lack of any kind of safety net or morality system to nudge me in one direction or another was a breath of fresh air that made my short time with Chapter One far more interesting than a straightforward adventure game.
Definitely intrigued. I hope it’s as good as Crimes and Punishment.
Chinatown Detective Agency has a new demo on Humble:
(Was a little surprised to not see this in the new Humble App)
We’ve played Detective: City of Angles twice now, and I’m writing it up since there probably won’t be a third play. There’s been a murder: you need to figure out whodunnit, withwhattheydunnit, and whytheydunnit.
This is a competitive detective boardgame, which deviates from the typical “visit a location and read the text” structure in two ways.
- There’s not just a single bit of text at each location, but if you go to a location with one of the 5 characters, you can question them about any of 10 subjects. Which isn’t that big a deal by itself, but enables the bigger change:
- The characters will not have a single answer, but there’s a gamemaster (“Chisel”) who will choose from up to four options what the character will reply. Some replies are lies, other are technically true but red herrings, and there’s a single canonical best answer that each character can give, and ways for the players to use resources to get that best answer if they suspect the character is not being helpful. (The Chisel has an incentive to not make the characters lie about everything.)
This feels like it should produce interesting dynamics, where the players need to have an understanding of the characters and the case to know when to press them for a better answer. Or perhaps even when to return to a character and ask again about the same thing, after you’ve learned something that contradicts their story. But in reality this system turns out to be irrelevant. It’s too obvious what the important questions are and when to push, and even if that became harder in later cases, the economy is just so loose that you don’t need to be particularly careful.
So the main gimmick doesn’t work, which could still be ok. But to support this system, they’ve had to build way too much game and way too little story.
Too much game: The downtime is unbearable even with 4 players (3 detectives, one chisel), since the play structure has each player take 4 actions in a row, fuzzing around with card decks, envelopes, etc, and writing things down. None of which can be parallelized, and where the other players’ options to affect the game are pretty minimal. (Basically you can use the resources also for snooping on the answers to the questions others ask, but it’s just not enough to keep people engaged).
Too little story: The cases hardly even qualify as mysteries. There’s like a single obvious throughline + 1-2 red herrings that are quickly proven non-obvious. For any crucial bit of information, they’ve made sure it can be found in several different ways. And then it’s just about asking characters about various incriminating things, pressing them for the “most helpful answer” to guarantee they’re not lying, and seeing who doesn’t outright deny having done it. Winning the race to solve the case quickest comes down entirely to who happens to stumble onto that main thread first.
Our Chisel is going to play forward in single-player, and alert us if/when the cases actually become interesting and maybe give it one more chance. But a) I think it’s unlikely they’ll manage to make very good constraints given how little text they have to work with, b) even if that happens, I just don’t see a better case rescuing this turd of a system. It’s just too slow, too fiddly, and the central gimmick doesn’t add what you’d imagine it does.
I’m glad you wrote that up as this was on my potential list. But that much downtime is a real killer for the groups I play with.
Well this is intriguing:
This sounds like SWAT 4 meets hard knock noir. I love it.
I played the pre-release demo a year ago on the developer’s request (thanks to this thread, incidentally). This is the feedback I gave:
The investigation part did not feel very interesting. It was just a matter of finding every hotspot (which could take quite long even with the hotspot indicators). The core problem was that there was no point in engaging with the findings until you were ready to start solving, and no point in starting solving until you had unlocked all the clues. (And since the clue text is mostly very short and fact based. Reading a clue wasn’t its own reward.)
I liked the last puzzle since there was both an attempt at framing and a way to tell it was a frame. That’s a satisfying kind of deduction from the environment rather than just spoonfed clues.
The multiple choice gameplay worked well enough, and I can see the Obra Dinn influences. It didn’t quite give the same effect, due to the much more constrained scenarios and more explicit hints. Satisfying as a logic puzzle, but it felt a bit mechanical rather than the intuition and leaps of logic from a fictional master detective.
I’m curious about what they changed, and especially if they managed to design their additional scenarios to lean more into the subtle environmental clues than explicit “here’s a word you can enter into the multiple choice question” ones that were the meat and potatoes of the demo. It’s definitely worth a shot. but I think the avclub review is overselling it.
I just played the new demo (and posted in the Indie thread–forgot about this one!) and I really liked it! The answers weren’t obvious just from collecting all the words. And there’s a story thread that connects all the individual scenes, with characters and objects showing up in multiple scenes and sometimes the scenes being solved by the player out of chronological order. I’m not positive, but I think I’ve even found some details that indicate a meta-mystery you’ll have to go back through several scenes to solve. If I had income right now, I’d have bought the game already! :)
I’m on the 9th case now, and I’m still really digging Case of the Golden Idol. It’s the closest anything has come to scratching that Obra Dinn itch.
Yeah, it’s nowhere near as artfully crafted, but one thing it has over Obra Dinn, at least for me, is that the cases are relatively self contained. It’s much easier to wrap your head around all the facts you need to pin down each mystery, and the interface makes going back and checking things easier. I still resent the fact that Obra Dinn didn’t just let you jump between visions in the book.
I agree there. Having the cases relatively constrained in scope is nice. And I like having the option to toggle on hotspots once I’ve made a pass through the environments, just to snag any missed words in a letter or whatever.
I just wish there were a bottomless well of games like this. I can only play Obra Dinn for the first time once.
Last detective game I’ve played was Mean Streets on my old C64. Actually, Police Quest 3 was the last, and I played it on my old Tandy 286 PC with integrated VGA sound and audio. I guess I’m not particularly well-versed in the genre though I do appreciate how smart it can be.
I’ve been playing The Case of the Golden Idol and I was curious how much time my friends had spent playing it and… @Nightgaunt:
3.5 hours! I skimmed the achievements on my library wall and maybe you’ve completed it? I saw a ‘solved case 11’ so I’m guessing so! I’m clearly very slow with these things! :D
I’m loving this thing by the way, including the visuals and music.
I think it took me six or seven hours? I loved the whole thing. I wish there were a never-ending supply of games like this.
And, yeah, the music is fantastic. Case 10 was probably my favorite for that.
So I don’t know whether these fit into the genre but I’ve got (checks notes): Heaven’s Vault, Hypnospace Outlaw and The Forgotten City to check out. There’s also Pentiment, Paradise Killer, Her Story and Immortality. From my understanding these all fall under ‘investigative’? So perhaps not ‘detective games’ as such.
I definitely finished it! And it did go quicker than I would have liked but… I feel like I spent at least five hours on it, and probably more.
Oh! I did play the demo first, which covered the first few mysteries. I think I started from scratch when I bought the full game, but I was able to cruise through those first few. So maybe that’s what happened! Still seems short…
One of the things I really loved about Case of the Golden Idol is the bite-size nature of the individual cases. Some I took a break from to thing about, but most of them I was able to complete in a single sitting.
I’d love just an endless stream of 10-30 minute quick mysteries.