I’m not sure Shadows of Doubt would work very well for that. It’s more a police procedural than a whodunit; it’s not really about reasoning about the case, but about doing the legwork, following the evidence, and having interactions between game systems cause funny emergent effects.
Case of the Golden Idol seems like a great fit for couch co-op. Others that I suspect would work well are Her Story, Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments, and maybe Return of the Obra Dinn.
It’s not… good, but Contradiction would be a great couch co-op detective game as it’s definitely best enjoyed with other people.
Return of the Obra Dinn?
Also Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney?
L.A. Noire?
Is the text too small to work well on Steamdeck?
Going to try this later JP so will keep you posted!
I’m going to try this later jp so will keep you posted!
Cool!
Can confirm. My partner and I have been enjoying this one together from the couch. I’m hoping they’ll port the 3DS games to Switch by the time we finish the original trilogy.
I’m partway through the first case, and this is exactly what I had wished for.
I’m not sure what your tolerance for small text is Jeff but I tried to take a snap of the screen on my lap! I don’t think it’s too bad but my eyesight is decent. Might just be a case of trying it out and seeing what you think.
The benefit of it being handheld is you can always “manually zoom” it closer to your face 😄
Had fun with the Golden Idol expansion. The puzzles aren’t as good, and it doesn’t lead up to a punchline like the first game, but I will literally buy any DLC they want to put in front of me.
I’ve just done the first chapter of The Spider of Lanka and, man, it’s good to be back on this! That initial ‘oh no, is that all I’ve got to work with?!’ followed by ‘I wonder if… aha!’ then later ‘I’m a genius.’
I’m kind of amazed that I recall Oberon Geller’s name from the first chapter of the base game given I played that 6 months ago.
I wrapped this up last night and really enjoyed it but its compactness made the density of stuff to consider a lot more overwhelming than anything I recall in the base game! Chapter 2 was a nightmare for me! Particularly the ‘test’ for the heirs, the notes from Ji and how the ritual connected with Yupik and the murders. Just bonkers. I also spent ages trying to work out what the hell was going on with the test symbols, the lines, the number and those 3D shapes before realising ‘Tissa is just shit at maths’. Sometimes the simplest solution is the right one.
I played it over the last couple days too! I agree, the cases were a step deeper and more complex, and it was a bit daunting at first. But good stuff!
Just saw a Twitter post about this game, which I hadn’t heard of and doesn’t seem to have come up in the thread. And it’s currently $2!
Whispers in the West – Online cooperative point-and-click with additional DLC cases. There’s a demo too. Gotta say, it would be fun to play through something like Golden Idol with others, so this could be fun!
I played Rain Code: Master Detective Archives, which is basically a Danganronpa / Phoenix Wright with Suda51 aesthetics. You probably already know if you’d be interested in it from that.
It’s shorter than I expected, with only 5 chapters. In that time, it hits all the murder mystery cliches (bottle episode, locked room mysteries, etc), but it feels kind of rushed in doing so.
I think the main problem is that there isn’t really a sense of escalation or anticipation. Every mystery is presented to you and then solved in the same chapter. While nominally, they do mention the capstone mystery throughout, the first 3 chapters barely have any connection to the last one, only the second to last chapter really connects to the finale. There’s some minor hints here and there, but not enough to make it feel like you’re really building a case across the entire runtime. It’s also super linear, it’s kind of impossible to miss anything or meaningfully explore branches.
Also, it has the Danganronpa / Phoenix Wright problem where you can know the answer, and know the evidence that you can use to prove it, but you kind of have to select from the very specific word cloud which of the 5 related things the developers decided that evidence connects to the most. Which is just kind of annoying.
The Master Detective Archives sub-heading and world building sort of suggests that they want to make this a franchise, but the story they tell doesn’t really leave much room it (the justification for the mind-palace metaphor you use to solve the crimes is pretty conclusively unavailable at the end of the game). Maybe there’s a perfect ending or something that does something different, but I’m not really motivated to find out.
It’s a decent Danganronpa, but not much more.
Also, Ghost Trick recently got an all-platforms re-release:
