Recent reviews by Bucktown

Sherlock Holmes: Devils Daughter is a good adventure game, but not in my favorite detective games.

Devil's daughter is a continuation of the Frogwares Sherlock Holmes series. It fits comfortably in the mixed category of detective games, containing both detective themes, and detecting mechanics. You play as Holmes and some associates, solving 6 varied crimes around London.

This formula worked well for me in the previous game, Crimes and Punishments. Here however, something didn't click for me. I found the action sequences, especially the Indiana Jones section to significantly outstay their welcome. I also found many of the deductions to make much less sense than in previous games, requiring a lot more just guessing.

It's still a solid game, but between this installment and Crimes and Punishments, I prefer the latter's focus more on the detecting, and not on stealth sections or tomb raiding.

If you want a more adventure heavy games with some detecting in the mix, this should be a great game for you!

Agatha Christie: Murder on the Orient Express is a solid detective adventure game.

Overall the game worked for me and I enjoyed it. I was really high on it after the first two thirds, where the classic storyline wraps up. I was less fond of the extension that was added after. I thought it felt out of place.

Less like the previous two entries in the series, the detective work is a lot more discrete and compartmentalized. This isn't necessarily bad, it just makes the game more of a story with detective elements than a detective game that follows a story. They were also pretty easy to brute force if you don't know the answer. The Puzzles were a scattering of the classics, like the puzzle box, Towers of Hanoi, and block stacking.

I enjoyed the train setting, the classic story, and the Joanna sections that augment that classic story. The big thing that annoyed the hell out of me was the facial animations. I think still frames with custom expressions would have served them better, but that's a highly subjective call.

I recommend this game for fans of Detective Adventures!

I recommend Her Story for investigation fans!

Her Story has you uncover a twisting narrative by searching keywords in a database. The cool part is that you only get to see the first 5 clips by chronological order, so the obvious terms have too many hits, so you don't see the key information from the later clips. Instead, you have to find your way to that information by trying various terms you hear in the clips and following those lines of terms.

The game doesn't have a fixed ending. You can try to uncover every clip, or you can wrap up when you feel you have the whole story.

I really enjoyed this game, despite the bug I will mention below.

Crimes & Punishments is a deduction game, wrapped in the frame of an adventure. You play as Holmes, and occasionally the droopiest basset hound ever, across six cases. You investigate crime scenes, interrogate witnesses and suspects, and make deductions based on your findings. At the end of each case, you make conclusions and an accusation of the responsible party, and a moral choice about their fate.

The investigation and conversation parts of the game are solid. Where I really enjoyed the game was the theme/setting, and the deductions. The game puts you into some quite nice Victorian settings, and really makes the world and the characters enjoyable to interact with and in. One slight drawback is that the quicktime events to challenge a suspect during interrogation or case resolution can appear out of nowhere, and I missed some because I took my hand off the keyboard.

The Deduction and conclusions were a highlight for me. By linking clues you get by investigating, you unlock a network of node ideas that have either one or two possible options. By selection between those options, you shape which conclusions you can arrive at. This felt great, because the game would allow me to interpret evidence several different ways, and not tell you which is correct until after the case. The evidence is also constructed to be allow multiple interpretations, and the player must really stop and think to figure out the most likely answer.

Unfortunately, I and many other players have a similar bug. While in the deductions web, if you click on a multi choice node, there's a chance the game crashes. This was a real mood killer. It happens to me about every 25 minutes or so? I didn't find any fixes online, but I did not search too hard. Even with this issue, I still enjoy the game enough to keep going. However, I totally understand if this is a deal breaker for other people.

I give this a qualified recommendation, because the bug might ruin an otherwise good experience.

Darkside Detective is a refined example of an adventure game. It does what's good abut he game type, but mostly doesn't suffer from chlorine fume huffing logic. Some of the bonus cases though got a bit dodgy on this from though. My only complaint is that it was hilariously bad to play on a 4k monitor, but that's something I did to myself.

After finishing the London Case, I don't recommend this particular title.

After playing this developer's previous entry in the series, Which I thought was decent, but needed some polish, I was excited for their second story. Unfortunately, this feels like the rough draft for the previous game. There are lots of bugs, and the mechanics feel less tuned than the previous game.

I had multiple issues. The most common was pathing failures.Poirot would routinely run into other people or get caught on objects, walking in place until you give him a new command. Additionally a few dialogs would not play when clicked, just disappearing. I don't think anything critical was lost, but I can't know for sure.

Unlike the previous game, you can now rotate rooms to be able to see and examine things on all four walls. However, this interacted poorly with the janky hitboxes, so finding where to click to interact with something became a challenge. I think the game would have been better served by not allowing you to rotate rooms, and instead spending that time on refining the layout and the hitboxes.

While the story was fun, I found the deductions you made to feel very arbitrary. The thought/clue linking felt all over the place, sometimes linking two things that felt the same, sometimes two arbitrary things. It felt like different guidelines were used for linking clues. The saving grace was the hit system that eventually highlights the links you need. I wish I had needed it less.

Overall, I feel this game was a step backward after the previous entry in the series.

I recommend The First Cases for mystery fans wanting a story heavy experience.

The First Cases is a detective game where you play the titular Poirot, and investigate multiple interwoven crimes. The bulk of gameplay consists of investigating scenes, interviewing subjects, and making connections on a mind map. The game is fairly linear, with only minor deviations allowable.

I liked the ambient sounds, and the voice acting was solid. I also really enjoyed the static character portraits that you see during conversations. In contrast, the conversation animations were not great, and felt very outdated. Same with some of the movement animations, but they are not really the focus of the game, so if you are just here for the story or detecting, they are a minor annoyance.

The Detecting was fun, but fairly casual. In contrast to a deduction focused game like Rise of the Golden Idol, The First Cases is a narrative journey. The downside of this is the game moves at a majestic pace. This is fitting with 1930's drawing room murders, but sometimes doesn't feel like it's respecting the player's time. Lastly, the deduction system was very hit/miss for me. Sometimes the solution was not something that I thought was reasonable. Fortunately there's a help system for when I got stuck, so that prevented this issue from being a major problem.

Overall I recommend this for people who want a slow detective story to play through.

A worthy sequel to the Case of the Golden Idol.

The Rise of the Golden Idol is a deduction game, where you unravel events and people surrounding the titular Golden Idol. Each scenario is bite sized enough that you don't feel overwhelmed by the possibility space, but there are enough variables to present engaging puzzles. You have to piece together what happened using your deductive skills.

A welcome improvement in the second installment in the series was the chapter challenges. After solving the scenarios of a given chapter, you get to piece together the bigger narrative, going back to solved cases for clues. I really enjoyed this larger structure, and how it tied the cases together well.

I highly recommend this to anyone who likes deduction games!

The ABC Murders is a detective game with Investigation, Deduction, and Puzzle box components, woven into a point and click framework. There is also a hint system that helps when you get really stuck, which allows me to stay in the world and not want to alt-tab for a guide.

I enjoyed it, and ended up with about 80% of the Ego points. It very faithfully follows the story of the book, which is normally good, but undercut any surprise for me since I had recently read the novel.

The Animations are kinda janky. It didn't stop me from enjoying it, but it was very clear the game didn't have enough resources to make people's mouth movements match their speech.

Overall I recommend the game for detective-adventure fans.

A fun detective game.

You can see how the series is developing. It's a solid foundation, but a bit too easy.