Inside: Return of the Obra Dinn, Case of the Golden Idol, Inspector Waffles, Murder Is Game Over, Tangle Tower (Det Grimoire #2), Subsurface Circular, The Samaritan Paradox

Only Tangle Tower is a rec, lol.

The Return of the Obra Dinn
(Lucas Pope, 2018)

So this game falls squarely into “Not my kind of thing.” I played it because it gets mentioned a lot and was clearly influential, but unfortunately, yeah, it’s just not the type of game/story/style I enjoy, which makes it hard to review. I can totally see how if you do like this type of story this would be a really great version of it, but it just didn’t do anything for me. I’m theoretically impressed by the visuals and atmosphere and the uniqueness of it but none of that makes it something I could enjoy.

This is a “cthulu did it” type mystery where you play as an insurance inspector given a magical watch that lets you see moments of death, and which you need to use to figure out how the entire crew and passenger list of a ship died. What I did appreciate about this game was that it was very up-front with the cthulu thing; I think the worst thing these stories do for me is pretend it’s a real mystery and then spring the cthulu on you at the end, but here the sea monster attack is front and center and it’s more about figuring out why the ship got cthulu’d and if anyone survived. This is the better way of handling these stories, IMO.

And the deduction puzzles were solid, though they did have some issues, the two big ones being 1) the low-res visuals made it hard sometimes to tell how people were dying, which was important because the game asked you to distinguish between things like “stabbed with knife” vs “stabbed with sword” and “clawed by monster” vs “bitten by monster” and “spiked” vs “speared”, which could be a bit frustrating; 2) the clues could sometimes require opaque leaps of logic, for example:

These details matter a lot because you have to get three people’s deaths right to get confirmation, so you can’t easily guess-test, and I wish in some instances there’d been a smidge more care involved. But I think this is inevitable when you have 60 distinct mysteries you have to create; quality is going to start to vary. Personally I’d rather one well-constructed mystery than 60 of varying quality but I get how if you’re here for the atmosphere and monsters the more vignettes the better.

The other thing I think people like about stuff like this that I don’t is the vagueness. I like stories where I know what’s happening and why, but I think the vague vagueness contributes to the atmosphere for a lot of people and one thing I’ve definitely noticed is that people seem to like speculating about why X, Y, and Z happened whereas for me not having major questions answered makes a story unsatisfying. “How did the Formosans even end up with the shell?” is the kind of question-without-answer that I find frustrating to not know, but I think cthulu types see it as an enticing hanging thread. Stories like this also tend to end up with a lot of plot holes, which isn’t bothersome if you’re here for the vibes, but which I find to be total immersion breakers because they’re funny to me and not mysterious. Here’s two of my favorites:

My one real complaint about the plot was that there was all this weird setup about some ‘bargain’ made to stop the monster attack that ended up going nowhere.

Anyway this is the kind of thing that for me isn’t really a mystery or detective story so I’m completely unqualified in terms of whether or not to rec it. You reading this was a great use of time, as was my writing it, congrats to us all.

Case of the Golden Idol
(Color Gray Games, 2022)

I am often underwhelmed by games that people love to hype up, but rarely am I so utterly bored by them. People are obsessed with this game, and it’s… bad? I found it to be so deeply uninteresting and the gameplay was so, so tedious.

The main problem is it’s not about anything. The game consists of 11 static scenes where someone has died and you have to click around until you can fill in the mad libs sheet the game gives you to say what happened. The connecting thread between the scenes is that all the deaths occur in the vicinity of the titular golden idol, a magic artifact that primarily seems to be very good at murdering people. At first it seems like it’s just going to be this thing getting a bunch of different people killed, but then it suddenly veers into the illuminati and then a guy trying to take over the world with it. It was incoherent.

To paraphrase Big Joel’s Review of the TV children’s movie Zombies 3, stories are more interesting when they’re about something, not because it makes them ‘better’ in some moral way to be political but just because a story with things it cares about is fundamentally more interesting and engaging than a story that doesn’t really care about things. As Big Joel points out, a story that’s not really trying to do anything in particular is boring and bland. And that’s the problem here — this game is so, so boring. It’s purely a vehicle for the gameplay, but I can get this same gameplay — and, frankly, far better iterations of it — in a much more interesting wrapper, from Wadjet Eye’s early use of the genre 20 years ago all the way through Seance of Blake Manor, which came out in October. This may come as a shock, but the prospect of clicking a screen isn’t inherently interesting to me, and unlike in a movie, there’s not even bright visuals (the art is hideous in a way that feels only semi intentional) or showtunes here to keep me engaged in other ways. And like… I’m aware I play a lot more logic puzzles than most people, but… these aren’t even particularly clever or interesting ones. These are not good logic puzzles. You just write down what you find when you find it; the biggest challenge is figuring out where to put the information in the mad lib, which I’ll get to in a sec. Everything is already there, it’s more a scavenger hunt than a deduction game. And its unwillingness to let you record information is just tedious.

It seems pretty clear to me that as things went on the developer started to feel hamstrung by their own premise, since in the last 1/3 or so suddenly these scenes get crazy huge and unwieldy; the last one is like 10 screens, maybe more. The biggest problem is that there’s no way to keep track of the clues you’ve found, and screens can be several layers deep. What this means is there’s an enormous amount of clicking through the same screens over and over to double-check one tiny piece of data so you can input it properly into the mad libs screen. It’s a UI nightmare, honestly, and there were multiple times where I knew what I needed to check and could. not. find it. and it was truly horrendous. And the bigger the scenes got the worse the issue got.

The other problem was that this format does not lend itself to large strings of info. A repeated issue with the gameplay is that it’s far too easy to figure things out by process of elimination. And I don’t mean brute force, I mean “there’s 5 missing names and I’m sure of 3 of then, and the most efficient thing to do now is to just test the other two in each place and see which triggers the COMPLETE message instead of sifting through screens for 15 minutes to find a bit of info.” But to combat this, the madlibs get insanely sparse. So you’ll have like:

_____ ______ _____ _____ _____ and ___ ___  ____ ______ _____ to ____ ______ ______ ______ _____ ______.

Then the solution will be something like, “Jim Smith killed Tom Johnson and Bob Warner stabbed Adam Brighton to stop Adam Brighton using Golden Idol.”

You may notice that those first two clauses are interchangeable and their verbs are virtually synonymous. This was a constant issue. I would know the solutions but would have to guess-test-revise which one went in which mad lib, which was incredibly frustrating. And first and last names wouldn’t connect and had to be moved individually, which was so tedious.

The other way they tried to get around cheesing puzzles was by having ungrammatical sentences, which I found very annoying. Trying to figure out if a missing article or infinitive was a [sic] or a clue about the word that went in the next space was impossible in a way that most definitely did not add to the experience. It felt like the game cheating, frankly.

And as I alluded to above, the QOL was just awful. Scenes often had carryover characters between them, especially consecutive ones, but would still make me input the names of people from scratch as if I had no idea who they were, which was profoundly irritating but probably also to make the madlibs less immediately clear. The lack of a journal was insane. That you couldn’t pull up info while trying to complete madlibs but had to fully navigate out of the UI into a totally different UI and then try to re-find the clue was Kafkaesque.

By far the most inane scene one was the 10th, where you had to click back and forth adding and subtracting tiny sums to complete the madlibs. When I realized what I was going to have to do I just immediately went No, absolutely not, and looked up the math solutions. That’s not a puzzle it’s just busywork. It’s padding. A four-hour game shouldn’t be padding itself like this, that’s insane.

This game was so boring relative to its hype that I find myself wondering if there was a big streamer promoting it or something — I can’t figure out why I keep seeing it mentioned over and over instead of contemporaneous games that are far better. It makes me feel like there must be a lurking variable of some kind and the best I can come up with is a really aggressive marketing campaign, because the narrative, art, and gameplay are all just awful.

I’m not even going to get into the racism tbh, this game is not worth my time on that front. Let’s just say there are about a dozen black-and-white movies MST did with this exact plot and all the same hangups.

Inspector Waffles
(Goloso Games, 2021)

Speaking of ‘games not about anything.’ This game was thoroughly mediocre and just very boring. It was basically Nut City Blues but worse and longer, without any of the clever bits or thematic elements and with too many not-clever ‘jokes’ and memery. It had that feeling of being someone’s first attempt at a story, leaning too hard on formula and not offering anything new because the writer doesn’t seem to have enough experience thinking about narrative. I also can’t imagine an actual adult thinking “cats and dogs are different, amirite??” was such a funny joke it needed to come up in every bit of dialogue; most of the dialogue was idle chitchat, ie, filler. The entire fifth chapter of the game is just one puzzle and then the villain monologuing their plan at you, complete with a recap of the entire plot. 50% of the dialogue in this game could have easily been cut without losing anything of substance.

I think it may be the worst of all the animal games so far, which is an unfortunate distinction, but if it was the very first one you ever played it’d be harder to notice how uninteresting it was. Unfortunately for me I’m dozens deep now.

The puzzles were often unintuitive and the unappealing pixel art was blobby and samey, making it tough to know what was interactable and what wasn’t. There was no actual detection or deduction; the puzzles were rarely actually relevant to the ‘mystery.’ Further, there were obtusely hidden collectibles that you needed to, idk, dowse or something to figure out in order to get a ‘secret’ ending, and I cannnot overemphasize how uninterested in that as a mechanic I am. Even in a story I actually found engaging it would have been annoying; I continue to fundamentally not understand locking content behind walls most of your audience will never see.

There’s really not much else to say about this one. It wasn’t bad, at least not in a way that made me like, actively unhappy, but there’s far too many good games in the genre to recommend something so bland and amateurish. Though I do have to say that I appreciate that when an animal game isn’t good, it’s ‘not good’ in a boring, amateur way and not ‘not good’ in a violent men and fascism way.

Murder Is Game Over
(HitherYon Games, 2022)

No-effort RPGMaker shovelware.

I’m honestly desperate to know where this person is from that they think there’s medieval castles in rural Vermont. Like, complete with an implied moat, gargoyles, and battlements. That made the game instantly hilarious to me, which is a truly bad way to start a murder mystery. Then the characters immediately started speaking in Plot (“Is it the club?” “Oh, you mean the Super Duper Gamer club who was here last night and you got into a suspicious fight with in public? No it’s not them.”). Then it referred to the cops as “the US local police” — at that stage I moved from wondering if it was a European dev to wondering if this game was made on Mars. Then it asked me to use my dog to sniff out a clue, which turned out to be that the wall of the castle had windows on one side but not the other, that thing dogs can famously smell.

So that’s where I went, “Oh, the dev just doesn’t give a shit,” and shut it down and refunded. I can only assume this is a series of assetflips. I’m usually pretty good at sussing those out and skipping them but got this on a rec from someone who I now will never trust again. Can’t imagine having standards this low when there’s freeware a billion times better than this.

Tangle Tower
(SFB Games, 2019)

This is the second Detective Grimoire game, and it improves on the first in pretty much every way! Enough that I would call it a general rec for a fun, if flawed, mystery game. It was a good time.

As usual, the art is gorgeous, and this time I have no complaints about the animations, which were also wonderful — I also liked the ‘Ed, Edd, n Eddy’ style squiggly outlines; sometimes I can find those annoying but they worked for me this time. Honestly the art direction has carried both of these games.

The big visual improvement is to the UI. Pretty much every complaint I had about the previous game has been fixed — the menus are simple and uncluttered, and work in intuitive ways that makes engaging with the game easy. Scrolling through dialogue is easier, talking to suspects is easier, and seeing everything is easier. Further, moving from room to room shows you walking around a large map which makes it clear how everything is connected and which direction you’re moving, which was a big issue for me last time.

And there are actual puzzles this time! I really liked the puzzle design! No more insipid “what color do blue and yellow make?” roadblocks, just genuine logic challenges, none of which are repeated throughout the game. I quite liked them as minigames.

The biggest changes are to the writing. For one, Grimoire is basically a completely new character, and he now has a partner, Sally, who despite technically having been in the previous game is also functionally a completely new character. I complained last time that Grimoire was kind of stupid, but they actually decided to lean into him being kind of a doofus, making him the emotionally intelligent character and Sally the more ratiocinating character. This ended up being the right choice. The dynamic between them was really great and I think it worked really well. The other benefit of adding a second detective was it let Sally and Grimoire play off each other as you investigated, which made the flavor text while looking around feel more lively and interesting.

There was definitely a concerted effort made to have characters that were more than their plot function this time. The characters and dialogue are leaps and bounds improved over last time, and while this isn’t ever going to be like, Darkside Detective in terms of character writing, it’s effective and works well for the type of game this is. The dialogue doesn’t take itself too seriously and I like that about it.

The other thing I brought up about last game was that the motive was too diffuse; too many characters had equal motivations and it made it hard to deduce who must have done it. They tried to fix this, but ended up going too far in the other direction. The culprit has so many different motivations that it ceases to make any sense — it’s convoluted enough that during the denouement Grimoire and Sally on two or three separate occasions have to go, “Okay, but why did you kill her?” because it had gotten so unwieldy that even the characters couldn’t keep track of what they were saying. I understand what happened here, especially on the heels of last game, but sometimes less is more. I think this would be a pretty easy fix, too:

What I will say is the motive being messy didn’t ruin the mystery for me; all the clues already point to the culprit and what’s going on before you know the details, so for me it still worked overall, but it did make the denouement weird and confusing. On the whole, though, I feel like everything was set up properly, even if it was Too Much narratively.

The other problem of things being too convoluted is dropped plot threads. While I said above there are certain questions that don’t have to be answered, there are some here that really should have been.

I think a couple of these may fall into that “the writers know but forgot to say” area, but it’s weird since they’re all pretty important to parsing the characters.

All that said, I really enjoyed this, and I’d rec it to anyone who likes the experience of mysteries and doesn’t mind then being a little flimsy at times. Like I said, the setup was good enough that for me the ending weirdness didn’t effect my enjoyment, and I’m actively looking forward to the third game, The Mermaid Mask, which will hopefully be released this year. (They also did a survival-horror mystery in 2024 that looks like their take on FNAF, which is very much Not My Thing, but I’m curious to hear if anyone has played it!)

Subsurface Circular
(Bithell Games, 2017)

Subsurface Circular was okay. It’s a visual novel about a detective robot who never leaves the subway for some reason trying to solve robot disappearances, and it kept my attention more than I thought it would. I don’t know why the cover photo is two robots fondling each other. It had nothing to do with anything which frankly I’m glad about.

This game is short — two hours for 100% — and it’s best if you don’t think about it too closely, since the worldbuilding… doesn’t make much sense (the detective bots acting in pairs that can easily be emotionally manipulated was particularly silly to me). But if you just go for the ride it’s entertaining enough. The writing is competent. The dialogue options aren’t too complex so you’re mostly just chilling.

I genuinely don’t know what else to say it, it was super milquetoast but in like a mildly competent way. I even slept on this because I thought maybe I was spent from writing all day but even a day later this game made no impression on me. I have no thoughts about it.

The Samaritan Paradox
(Faravid Interactive, 2014)

This game is just awful.

I don’t think there was a single point at which I had any idea what the actual fuck it wanted me to do. I mostly stumbled into progressing the story by interacting with everything, and even when I knew what I had to do, implementing the solutions was often so obtuse I still needed to look at a guide (looking at you, you fucking compass horse). This may be the worst-designed point-and-click I’ve ever played. Ten years after Wadjet Eye! Ten years!

The self-satisfied, navel-gazey story was insufferable. The game was so, so in love with how supposedly clever it was, which frankly was probably part of why the puzzle design was so bad. But also it was so busy thinking it was engaging it never spent time actually being engaging, and was actually insanely trite. I saw someone in a Steam forum thread say, “‘Wait, when did we learn that?’ might as well have been the subtitle of this game,” and it’s an accurate comment.

Then there’s the ugly, blurry pixel art, the miserable UI, the terrible demarcation of interactables, the weird bug where text would start autoskipping and I’d have to restart to fix it which meant hitting ALT-F4 because there’s no ‘quit’ button in the interface… This is far and away the worst of the point-and-click style detective games I’ve played. I may have hated this more than Chicken Police. The entire experience was just horrid from top to bottom.

About two hours in I managed to softlock myself by going to destinations in the wrong order, and I spent about 15 minutes trying to troubleshoot before going, “This game has made me miserable from top to bottom, why am I trying so hard to keep playing it?” and quitting. Nothing on god’s green earth could possess me to start this game over.

Unsurprisingly, based on Steam achievements, only 20% of people complete the first puzzle and only 9% finish the game, which is, frankly, high. To put that in perspective, 57% of people complete Tangle Tower. 50% finish Blackwell Unbound. 20% unlock everything in Seance at Blake Manor, something that took me almost 20 hours! This game is a nightmare.