I desperately want to recommend this game. I went in expecting a good time after hearing good things about it in the context of detective games. Just the context of a procedural immersive sim voxel detective game sounds kick-ass.

Unfortunately, after over 26 hours, I don't think most of them were a good time. I can't honestly recommend this game in its current state. They're apparently ramping up to a 1.0 release and this game is still a huge mess.

My first impressions were far from ideal. I accidentally broke into someone's apartment and beat them up in the tutorial case when I was supposed to knock on their door and talk to them, and the whole mission system to guide me through it got softlocked and had to restart it. I stayed with it because what I saw and the promise of this game was still really cool and hey maybe it was just a one-off bug.

It wasn't. This game is flooded with significant bugs at every corner. You sometimes clip through the floor on perfectly smooth flat surfaces (oops! you lost 20% of your money for no reason!). NPCs walk off into the sky (better hope they won't be important to a case!) or get permanently stuck between some boxes laid there by the world generator. Furniture in houses spawns half a meter off the floor. Rooms clip into each other. Black markets permanently stop having people working there. Security cameras randomly stop working. I can keep going.

These are all things that might eventually be fixed, of course. The fact that a game with these many moving parts even works at all is a miracle, but it's still not a game ready for prime-time. On the side of more design-oriented issues, there's plenty to talk about as well.

The NPC dialogue system is awful. Half the options are either literally completely useless or redundant. People will refuse to tell you their names even for 200 credits but will gladly let you snoop around their home. The "have you seen anything unusual" option is particularly strange in how worthless it is. One of my cases had nothing to go on except that almost every NPC in the city told me they saw an angry (completely meaningless) person of average height (about half of all people are average height) that "seemed to be in a rush" (completely meaningless, NPCs only run when chasing you or when it's raining) and a vague description of where they were that didn't help because none of those locations and times matched street camera photos.

NPCs are also both extremely flat and way too unpredictable for a game like this. You can break into someone's house, beat the ♥♥♥♥ out of them, rob them blind, walk away for 30 seconds, and they will gladly tell you anything you need to know and invite you into their home. At the same time, their behavior makes no sense. NPCs don't seem to follow any kind of schedule whatsoever beyond what time they go to work and even that is more of a suggestion, they can and do randomly decide not to show up to work or stay there for hours after they were supposed to go home.

The decision to have an easily accessible computer at city hall that gives you detailed info on literally anyone is baffling and basically trivializes the entire game if you have the patience to sit there for a few minutes typing 2 letter combinations and printing profiles.

But even WITH said computer some cases, especially side jobs, are basically unsolvable unless you document every single NPC in the city. You'll get an arrest warrant for someone and since the details you're given are seemingly completely random you might be looking for someone based on their shoe size, blood type, income, and the fact they like chess. Murder cases also sometimes are a dead end and you need to wait for the killer to strike again which can take forever. In the aforementioned case with the angry person of average stature I gave up and went to do like 5 side jobs until there was another murder and it never happened even after like 3 or 4 real hours. That was the straw that broke the camel's back for me.

Some of the immersive sim aspects, while really cool, are basically useless. There are ventilation ducts you can climb through in every building, too bad there's basically no reason to use them ever when breaking through the front door is easier and escaping pursuers is the easiest thing in the world. You can dial a number and trace where the phone call went using the phone routers in the building basements, but that's not exactly useful when (despite what you might think from the tutorial case) phones are basically never used for anything except initiating side jobs and it's trivial to get addresses at city hall.

Speaking of the tutorial lying to you, in the tutorial case you can visit a friend of the victim and tell them their friend died, at which point they're distraught and help you with your investigation. I don't know if it's cut content or if I experienced a bug in every city I generated, but this never happened in the sandbox. And that wraps around to how bad the dialogue system is. All of the weird and terrible design decisions feed into each other, it's incredible.

There's a base and an idea and an aesthetic here that could make a truly fantastic game, but the way they chose to take it is, in one word, incompetent. I really wish the devs were planning to fix all of this, but with the game seemingly full steam ahead towards a 1.0 release soon-ish I don't have much hope this game will ever be the best it can be. They might slap whatever number they want on it, but until the bugs are ironed out and those huge issues fixed, this game will be in permanent early access.