Recent reviews by Sɐɯ

I recommend it, but you should choose to play it understanding that despite the appearance of the game it's a very linear story with a very specific sequence of events and character development that you can do little to impact. It's more like a normal point-and-click game in how the game flows than something like Telltale or Disco Elysium or whatever.

Good:
* Novel chapters with unique environments, concepts, characters and stories
* Overarching mystery that you gradually figure out as you play is a good reason to keep going
* Great help system - you won't really get stuck anywhere even if games like this are somewhat a 'puzzle' game
* Exploration is fun and rewarded
* Ink as a limited resource to change the flow of the stories is cool and makes decisions *feel* more impactful
* Chapters feel about the right length and get wrapped up before they start getting tiring
* Game is to me a suitable length for the price

Mixed:
* Inconsistent story quality across chapters. Funnily enough that can somewhat be explained away as the books the main character walking through being not terribly well written in the game universe (one of them is rated 3 out of 5 by a magazine lol), but ultimately the game occasionally struggles from it.
* The game moralizes about your choices every so often but also forced you to make many of those bad decisions. In a linear story game this would have been a bit more understandable, but the game goes to some length to present itself as if you *did* have a choice, so it's a bit frustrating.

Bad:
* Combat is tacked on and the entire game would be better if it was just removed.
* Player agency is lacking and the game does NOT do a good job disguising this. You will occasionally feel that the outcome didn't match the decisions you made.
* The main character for some reason insists on not getting spoiled on or reading ahead in the books they're walking through. Why? It's never explained and feels dumb considering they're risking their life and have a huge vested interest in succeeding.


Overall, not a perfect game but I've enjoyed myself playing it and I will remember it favorably.

Probably my favorite game of the last few years. However, you really need some tolerance for bugs to really enjoy it. You're guaranteed to encounter apartments with cameras but no computer anywhere which can access them, or clues which bug out when they're added to your case board, or whatever. Thankfully it's extremely rare that you can't play around these bugs since there's typically never a single thing that makes or breaks a case.

This is a game that really rewards creative thinking and lets you make actual deductions based on environmental clues, and I mean that - you can outright solve some cases by paying attention to something as implicit as where a shot must have come from by paying attention to bullet holes and e.g. if there's a cartridge at the scene, so any particular piece of evidence bugging out can be annoying but on the other hand also becomes a very doable challenge of finding another way to solve the case and has occasionally also made cases more fun by getting me out of my habits. I realize that sounds super optimistic, but I really wouldn't have thought of a bunch of cool ways to solve cases if I hadn't been challenged with the omission of certain clues (whether due to bugs or just a higher difficulty), and those ended up being my favorite memories with this game.

But beyond all that - it's a detective sim with random cases! If that doesn't speak to you, this game probably never will. If it does, you'll probably find a way to enjoy it even if there is jank. At its core it is a procedural puzzle game with a living city built around it, and it's a lot of fun. The only thing I find a bit questionable is the addition of stealth to the game, but honestly it doesn't change the game much outside of a bit of fumbling learning how it works in the early game.

Oh, and don't be afraid to play with the difficulty sliders. I never enjoyed the modifiers and things like hunger/thirst, and you can completely turn them off. I also recommend making the game city as big as possible if you're going to do a longer game, because I find myself memorizing large parts of the city otherwise which can cut down on the actual necessity for doing deductions (e.g. I recognize a person because I thought they were super suspicious the last time I broke into their apartment lol).

Recommended, but way too short if you're buying this at the regular price. The entire game takes less than two hours from start to end if you're somewhat familiar with adventure games. IMHO, buy it on sale. The game itself is fun(ny) but there's just better value at this price-point.

I liked it a lot, but honestly it's worse than the first Golden Idol game. If you're curious about this game but haven't played the other one - start there, not here.

As to why it's worse - they consistently give you less information and more vague options to pick between when recreating the scenarios. In the original, I didn't frequently think "If only they showed me X", but in this one I do because the information withheld feels arbitrary (e.g. something is visible in one time but not another). The previous game I feel was about recreating scenarios given a 'snapshot in time' and all that it entails, but in this I feel that critical information in the scene is being withheld from you intentionally just to make figuring things out more difficult. As a consequence it feels more like a game than its predecessor and, as weird as it feels to say for a game with such strange aesthetics, I didn't feel nearly as immersed or invested while playing. Ultimately though, I understand - the developers want to make this challenging even for people who are familiar and experienced with the mechanics from the previous game, but I don't enjoy this kind of difficulty in games and more than I like bullet sponge enemies in FPS games.

Ultimately I'd recommend this to people who have played the previous one and enjoyed it, but don't expect the same sense of satisfaction or awe.

Solid adventure/point and click game with a lack of polish that will sometimes irritate but not ruin the magic outright. Also, don't mistake the aesthetic with thinking this is aimed at younger gamers, the story beats, difficulty of puzzles and humor are more suited towards teens and up.

Pros:
* Fun characters
* Unique and interesting world building/setting
* Alright story
* Fun puzzles
* Good hint system that is as capable of dropping you vague hints as it is outright telling you the solution (when you're really stuck)
* Decent music
* A simple way to show all clickable objects on the screen
* Generally few enough interactive things per 'area' that you can get through the story without much issue.

Cons:
* Underdeveloped villain whose motivations are never explained
* Buggy. You will have to forcefully close and relaunch the game at least once an hour.
* Spotwise rough English translation. For example the hint system calls an object a 'break chute' when it means a brake parachute, or a character referencing a 'Gold vine' when it means a gold vein. These are not really big issues but it takes you out of it when the voice actor says the mistranslations out loud.
* Similarly the voiceacting of quite a few lines fall flat, *but* this really improves past the initial part of the game.
* Sometimes quite slow dialogue, and some puzzles can only be solved by exhausting dialogue trees.


Overall I'm happy I played it and I'll have fond memories of it, especially since none of the bugs required more than a simple game restart and I always play my games windowed anyway. Stay away if you're looking for a super polished experience or are not familiar with the genre, but someone who historically enjoys indie point & click/adventure games won't go wrong trying this out.

Look, I had the same reaction as you looking at the pictures. Yes, it's weird, strange, confounding and bizarre. No, it doesn't matter. It will grow on you, and by the end there's about a 0% chance you won't be itching for more.

The basic game is being presented with a number of scenes, which you have to click through and pay attention (like, YOU, it's not a click-this-and-receive-a-notification-you-clicked-the-right-thing kind of puzzle game) in order to put together what's happened, who did what and so forth. As you progress through the levels they get a lot more complex, and by the end what originally felt like a bunch of disconnected weird scenes have a very compelling and interesting meta-narrative, and you've also transitioned to solving just within a level but also answering what's connected between levels and what's happening on a grander scale.

'Investigation' and 'Detective' are really appropriate tags for this game, but YOU are the detective and YOU are investigating, as opposed to just playing a character which stumbles upon the correct solution if you just click things enough. A thinking person's story game. Very fun and rewarding, imo.

Highly recommended to anyone that enjoys story-rich games without a focus on action.

Masterclass in idle game design. 10/10

Deep narrative game with a *lot* of meaningful decisions to make along the way, and only very few of them are clearly good/bad but instead generally have a lot of nuance. A surprising amount of content and things to find/explore as well, and despite my time with the game (~12 hours) apparently I still didn't find everything.
I'd recommend it to anyone that enjoys games that let you roleplay characters the way you want them to, enjoy worlds where humans act with their own motivations but no one is really evil, and people who enjoy fantasy worlds where 'monsters' are just animals.

Also, I recommend playing this on the easiest difficulty if you enjoy immersing yourself in fantasy worlds. There's still plenty of things you can screw up, but you have a lot more time to explore and just enjoy the world - which since world building is such a big part of why this game is cool actually makes me feel like I 'won out' by making that choice.

This is fantastic and the art-style is sublime, works great on Linux. It's also rare that a game makes me laugh but this one got me a couple of times just because it's so freaking absurd at times. I was initially concerned about the time-limit in the game since I was just looking for a relaxed experience, but it turns out the time limit doesn't really matter much and replaying is encouraged (without any progress loss).

Super cool half-dystopian sci-fi universe and the point of view of a detective is the perfect position from which to explore both the highs and the lows of this society. The writers also did a good job allowing a lot of quite radically different story-impacting choices without sacrificing story depth (there's plenty of intrigue) or character development. It's been a while since I played a game with a branching narrative where my choices actually felt like they were impacting the character I was playing.

The 'detective' angle isn't shoehorned in either and you actually have to analyze your environment and make correct deductions to progress through the 'good' path in the game. Sometimes the answers were too obvious, but overall held a pretty good level of difficulty.

Overall, a great short game (maybe 5-6 hours) for a single day binge session or to play in somewhat longer chunks. I wouldn't recommend this game to anyone with a very busy schedule that can only commit less than 30 minutes at a time because the game only saves at specific points which means you're sometimes 10-15 minutes removed from a save spot and the game lacks some quality of life features that would make replaying segments faster.