Noir Punk
Full play through here if you get stuck or just want to see the game played:
Review:
Great game I love the noir genre so the aesthetic of this game is already a win for me it’s done pretty well and has some nice humor in it. My two main complaints is one I couldn’t find a way to make it full screen or any options for that matter and the sound puzzle this is a personal one for me because I HATE SOUND PUZZLES, unless they’re blatantly obvious I’m insanely garbage at them so full disclosure I had to cheat the one in this game which I show how to do in the video. Overall though this is a great free to play with a really nice story I loved the break in puzzles with the action scenes as well that was a super nice touch.
– Real player with 3.7 hrs in game
Read More: Best Detective Side Scroller Games.
A fun half-an-hour experience
Loved the style and attention to details
Action sequences are a bit tough to control but there’s no tight platforming or heated situations to make it a problem
The programming is a bit rough but for a jam game it is a cool experience!
– Real player with 0.9 hrs in game
Lamplight City
Steampunky Island
Systemising detective work in games is difficult to do well. That’s why my interest was naturally piqued when hearing of City’s absence of a failure state. I’ve enjoyed various other games experimenting with text entry and linking/contradicting evidence to allow the player to truly embody the role, so the ability to ‘fail’ was suggestive of a promising amount of player agency. Playing Lamplight City remains a joyous experience, but it isn’t so much in its systems that it entertains, but its presentation, stories and characters. As a modern take on the 90s point and click it truly thrives.
– Real player with 22.6 hrs in game
Read More: Best Detective Alternate History Games.
sniff sniff I smell a murder.
I could always go for a great mystery story. Whether it’s the core of the story or just one part of it, like trying to find out how one guy is cheating and in turn, how the main character will try to outsmart them. Then there’s a choice between how interactive the story is with you. Other than what kind of mystery you’ll be facing, there’s also different levels of interactivity. Some aims to let the audience tag along and give you a chance to try and solve it alongside the main character; while some actually keeps their audience in the dark till the end to focus on being fun (personally, I take a liking to both). With games, you can’t exactly be kept in the dark and you get the added bonus of being in the middle of it. In Lamplight City’s case, you take the role of a detective, ready to solve the various cases that is brought to your attention.
– Real player with 18.7 hrs in game
Penny Arcade’s On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness 3
This quickly became one of my favorite RPG’s as well as my personal favorite game in the PAA series, and with good reason. There’s quite a lot I’d like to say, so let’s get to it.
The game takes place 2 weeks after the events of Episode 2, but what’s neat is that you don’t need to have played it to understand the story going into Episode 3, as they immediately give you a summary of prior events upon talking to one of the statues in the Detective Agency. That alone makes Episode 3 easy to pick up and play, and the gameplay will keep you around for the long haul.
– Real player with 105.9 hrs in game
Read More: Best Detective Lovecraftian Games.
This game was an enjoyable throwback to 16bit turn based RPGs, but with a twist. They improved the combat system by adding some complexity without making it overly complicated. Since the core of all these turned based RPGs is mostly how well and fulfilling the combat is, the majority of this review will go over that section in detail to give you a greater understanding of how the game plays. I broke down the review in bold sections so you can read what is most important or what is most interesting to you in order of importance.
– Real player with 16.2 hrs in game
Sherlock Holmes: The Silver Earring
I bought this game on Steam after recalling it from many years ago, so it was, to some extent, bought to appease my nostalgia. I remembered correctly that the game could be difficult at times.
However, if you have a walkthrough at hand to give you a hand (should you find yourself having overlooked some miniscule detail), the game should be fairly easy to traverse and take about seven hours to complete. However, I think that while $10USD could usually be considered a reasonable price for 7 hours of entertainment, in the case of a game that is 14 years old, I think $5USD seems a more justifiable figure, so it’s best you buy this on sale.
– Real player with 19.5 hrs in game
This game had so much potential and can be resonabley enjoyable but only if you have a walkthrough at hand because some of the elements of the game are beyond obscure…
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There is a game breaking bug which means if you don’t pick up the picture of a young woman in the powder room at the start you will never be able to complete the game. But you won’t find this out until several hours later, by which time it is way way way too late.
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At the end of each “chapter” is a quiz, however on several occasions there are a number of items that can correctly answer a question being asked, but unless you pick the item the GAME wants you to pick it will tell you that you are incorrect and won’t let you proceed, even if the item you picked ALSO contains the same information.
– Real player with 18.9 hrs in game
Detective Boiled-Hard / Case File - Death of the Space Dino Hunter
when I started uploading screenshots of this game, I realized there’ll be screenshots of every f****** minute of it. And I want more, honestly. Buy, giggle & enjoy!
– Real player with 3.1 hrs in game
I really enjoyed Trials and Traces: The Tomb of Thomas Tew, an earlier game by this developer, Because Because. It’s not available on Steam as of the writing of this review, but it is available over on itch.io. It was a nice little gem within a collection of other independent adventure games, with turned out to be a great purchase, because it put games like Death Has a Million Stomping Boots and Beard in the Mirror on my radar.
When Because Because released Detective Boiled-Hard, I jumped on it right away. This game is a bit on the shorter side, clocking in at about 90 minutes of play – but it’s a solid and enjoyable (and fully voice-acted!) 90 minutes. Detective Boiled-Hard never once pretends to be a serious game of any sort. It fully embraces bad jokes, self-referential humor, so-bad-they’re-amazing celebrity impersonations, and insane situations.
– Real player with 2.7 hrs in game
Door To Door
Door to Door. Hmm… this game is hard to rate. I really wanted to like it, and I do in some aspects, but what’s most disappointing is the fact that this game could have been something really special. Unfortunately, it falls short of being a great game.
Pros:
The graphics are beautiful
For the most part, you must find and follow clues
A rich and extremely detailed world
Very large and diverse areas to explore
Cons:
The cases are very silly (not funny silly, stupid silly)
The game takes your clues and solves the case for you (too much hand holding)
– Real player with 13.7 hrs in game
There are a slew of caveats for this game, but there’s something about it which just grabs me.
It’s essentially a walking simulator/exploration game. It’s set in a world where agents in robot bodies run Ministries which control aspects of reality (e.g., Sound, Colour, Light). And administration agencies like the Ministry of Order police them. You are Bixby of the Dept. of Correction Pending; in exchange for your efforts to cut through the Ministry of Order’s bureaucracy, you are not only the last agent in your department, but trapped in the Lounge District. The Lounge District is a labyrinth of glossy lobbies, bars, suites, malls, parks, and bus lots – all abandoned by the Ministry of Order agents when you interfered. It’s up to you (and your trusty radio operator Stiggs) to troubleshoot all the weird happenings that go on.
– Real player with 13.4 hrs in game
Sherlock Holmes: The Mystery of the Mummy
After playing all of the Sherlock games from ‘The Silver Earring’ onwards, I wanted to go back right to the beginning and play them all through chronologically before the new one due out this year. I’m giving this one the thumbs down as much as I want it to be a thumbs up because of so many speed humps that actually interrupt the flow of the game. Probably the first thing to mention is the continuous crashing, particularly at the end of cut scenes and chapter ends. MAKE SURE YOU SAVE OFTEN. I cannot reiterate that point enough. Much frustration comes after completing a devilish puzzle to have the game crash and redo it ALL over again. However, these crashes can be overcome with the good ole ESC key, for the most part.
– Real player with 8.4 hrs in game
Terrible voice acting, Terrible puzzles, Not much sense
I decided to purchase the Sherlock collection to play through and started with this to play them in order of release.
I encountered lots of crashes during my playthrough and I will list the fixes I used below.
Puzzles
The puzzles aren’t very smart, more of collect all the bits and then click those bits to put in that bit. They’re difficult because half the time you can’t find the things you need. The picross puzzle at the end took me many attempts for it to actually register that I had done it even though I was getting it right.
– Real player with 6.9 hrs in game
Hypnospace Outlaw
In writing this review and reading it back, I find myself struggling to write about it enough to get across my sheer admiration without spoiling the whole thing to prospective customers. I apologise in advance. Suffice it to be known that I recommend Hypnospace Outlaw in the fullest extent my enthusiasm can avail. At the risk of sounding like a fanboy, it is perhaps one of the greatest pieces of fiction I’ve ever consumed. I hope to explain why.
Whenever I think about this game and the experiences it gave me, there’s a dull aching sensation in my chest. I experienced something truly wonderful and moving. I was immersed completely and, ironic considering the active hours of Sleeptime Computing, often burned my candle far too low, ravenously trying to see what else the game had for me.
– Real player with 34.2 hrs in game
A satirical homage to 90s internet on the surface, but so much more underneath that.
Hypnospace Outlaw is a game that connected with me on a deeper level than I ever would have anticipated. While it may seem like a fairly lighthearted comedy at first (and it IS a comedy; there are several moments where I laughed out loud at the absurdity), it is so much deeper than that. Where Hypnospace Outlaw excels, in my opinion, is the world that it creates while you explore the depths of this alternate-reality version of the web.
– Real player with 27.8 hrs in game
The Crimson Diamond: Chapter 1
A faithful-take on the Sierra-style adventure games of the 1980s, The Crimson Diamond takes the player on a Laura Bow-esque mystery adventure providing a text-parser and 4-bit graphics to guide you through the tale.
While the game is decidedly dated, it does a great job emulating the style and mechanics of games from this period and of this genre. It lasts about 4-8 hours and is more fun to solve than it is a chore, but it does require some puzzle-solving. The creator of the game is an illustrator and very much wants you to see their quality work of the pixel art variety and does a good job not to gatekeep content behind unnecessarily difficult challenges. The text-parser is also great and generally does not get in the way of figuring things out. It gives useful feedback if words or actions you are attempting are flatly not possible or going in the wrong direction. If you’ve not played a game using a text-parser, this certainly is a great way of seeing how they were typically implemented in games back in the day.
– Real player with 3.3 hrs in game
Want to go back in time and replay an old Sierra Classic? Well now you won’t need to “use hammer on head” to achieve that result!
In seriousness, The Crimson Diamond has all the hallmarks of the Sierra adventure games of old, and even some helpful extras! The look of the game is spot on as is the feel. With an interesting cast of characters and a plotline sure to devolve into chaos, this demo promises great things for the full version.
If you’ve never played any classic Sierra adventure, this game is a smooth and fun glide into that style of game featuring helpful and unintrusive tutorials into the gameplay.
– Real player with 2.5 hrs in game
The Low Road
I really wanted to like The Low Road and I wish Steam had a ‘meh’ button.
Pros: Choices matter and dialogue decisions really impact how things go. The opening puzzle is all about using social engineering to get a target to willingly give up secret information and the game does a good job of hinting at where people’s buttons are which is great. Puzzles are mostly contained to a few screen so there isn’t a lot of backtracking filler anbd loading times as you scour the environment for clues and items. Finally, the voice acting/writing on the two main characters is well done and I actually liked the main character which is very important when you’re following them on an adventure like this.
– Real player with 10.5 hrs in game
Going into this game, I didn’t know what to expect. I finished it in about 4 hours. That’s with leaving the game running while taking short breaks every once in a while.
Story
The beginning of the game starts off very enticing and intriguing. You get to talk to all the characters and learn little unique aspects about them. However about halfway through, the plot seemed to take a turn I wasn’t expecting. The missions began losing their sense of seriousness to me. This happened to the characters as well, particularly Turn. I understand his character goes through an internal conflict, but his conflict seemed pretty humorous to me.
– Real player with 7.4 hrs in game