Mini Mystery Reviews (Part 2)
The Darkest Files
The Darkest Files is something of a wish fulfillment these days: you play as prosecutor Esther Katz in 1950's Germany, and your job is to prosecute ex-Nazis for the crimes they committed during the Third Reich. Not the big, capital-C Crimes (though they will certainly be mentioned a lot, especially by your co-worker Peters), but the smaller stuff - a wrongful execution of a man who was arrested in place of his son, and a girl who had a confession beaten out of her before being sent to the guillotine. And as you might guess from the subject matter, this is a pretty bleak and depressing game. The cases are pulled directly from real crimes that were committed by the Nazis, and even include a summary of what actually happened in real life - to highlight the immense difficulty of what your characters are doing in the story, one of the cases was retried five times between 1956 and 1967, before finally having its victim's name cleared in 1991.
Mechanically, the game is a mix of investigation mechanics loosely held together by an Ace Attorney-ish presentation. Each case starts with you getting an introductory briefing, as well as the relevant case files from the initial investigation, before cutting you lose to try and figure out what actually happened. Paula, the office secretary, can call in new witnesses to give testimony as well as track down additional documents as they become relevant, making her an invaluable resource for your investigations - but beyond that, you're basically on your own. Once you've met with all the witnesses for a case, you're tasked with answering five core questions about the case, showing who was where (and when) on a blueprint that matches the crime scene layout, and providing three documents to back up your assertions for each of the five questions. And this works really, really well. It's not as arduous as a full-on database puzzle game (Her Story, Type Help, etc), but still maintains a lot of the detail-oriented requirements, especially on the highest difficulty where you have to point out which individual paragraph on any given document is the relevant one.
Unfortunately, its fatal flaw is the game is really, really short. While it is mildly impressive that it manages to wring about 10 hours out of a mere two cases, this means that nothing ever really gets time to breathe or be expanded upon. The first case has to teach you how to play while simultaneously hitting the ground running, and the second case introduces a couple wrinkles to those mechanics - most notably the idea that "no one" or "nothing" is a valid answer to the questions posed about each case. However, since this is case 2 of 2, there is no hypothetical future case where this might be something you need to keep in the back of your mind; it was obviously told to you because it's relevant to this case, and there's no more game after that once you solve it. Same goes for the idea of issuing a search warrant, another cool investigation idea that ends up only being relevant to get you the final piece of evidence that you need.
This is doubly true for the game's plot - Peters regularly interrupts you to tell you about a case that he's working on involving the systematic cover-up of Concentration Camp guards murdering prisoners and reporting them as "runaways," and by the end of the second case, it's clear that he's found some big, incriminating stuff. The way the game tells it, you really feel like something is going to happen to Peters, like he's going to get hurt or not come back from his flight to Poland and it'll be up to us to close out his case for him. Hell, one of the final things the game throws at you is that not only are you all going to tackle Peters' case together, it turns out that both the judge you've been seeing throughout the game AND your dad were among those contributing signed blank pardon forms for the guards. Parts of the job were already personal for Esther, but this? This is a huge bombshell. What do you mean our dad might have been a Nazi collaborator?
And then the game cuts to credits. The case, which it's been hyping up for the previous 10 hours, plays out in the background as the credits roll, and all we get to see are short snippets of what would be the first of three Auschwitz prosecutions. The game feels unfinished, as if it's missing another smaller case where you can make use of some of those investigation tools that Case 2 introduces, and a big finale where you actually play out Peters' case, working with the other attorneys. Instead, it...just kind of ends. What's there is really good! It does a great job of showing the mundane kind of evil that was required to sustain something like the Nazi government, and it has a particular venom for the idea that "just following orders" is any sort of excuse or explanation for allowing terrible things to happen on your watch. But it's also only half a game, so take that as part of the value proposition here.
Detective Instinct: Farewell, My Beloved
Detective Instinct is a game I really wanted to like more than I did. For one, it is an unashamed homage to the Famicom Detective Club games (and their ilk, like Portopia), something we rarely see these days and I wish we got more of. The art style is fantastic, clearly aping Hotel Dusk with big, beautiful spritework for the main portraits and a slight filter over lower resolution backgrounds, though I can't say I'm too fond of the full film grain effect that plays over the cutscenes. The music is great, I appreciate the quality of life stuff they've added to help smooth over the otherwise straightforward FDC gameplay, and the characters are mostly well-written and interesting to talk with. Emma is a great deuteragonist (though clearly riffing off of Ayumi of FDC fame), and while I wish the main character had a bit more of a personality, he at least always has Emma to bounce off of, unlike our FDC hero.
And yes, I hear you asking: "Okay, what's the 'but' that's clearly coming next?" To which I can only respond that there really isn't much game there to work with. This is not to say the game is unfinished - unlike The Darkest Files, this is clearly a complete story that was as long as the developers intended. Nor am I saying that the story feels rushed - the discoveries and plot twists are largely paced well. But this is a game that takes "All Killer, No Filler" to what is arguably its logical extreme; the game effectively never slows down or stops moving forward, except for the recap scenes that take place at the end of each day. There is almost no downtime, no opportunity for the characters (or us, for that matter) to stop and catch their breath, take a quick break to go over their notes, or maybe talk about the term paper that they're both putting off for the sake of this investigation. To be clear, I am not advocating for filler content, but the train ride where the bulk of the game happens is only three days long, and takes a mere four hours to power through. Surely there were opportunities to add a little downtime and spread things out, maybe over five days instead of three.
To the game's credit, what is there is competently executed and fun to play through. While not every character is a home run, they are at least all fun to interact with and their storylines are interesting to unravel. There aren't very many of them, admittedly, and at least a couple of them feel kinda "wasted" in the sense that they don't really do anything for most of the game until they suddenly become really important on the final day. It's also arguable that the game's narrative is oddly low-stakes; for a story that starts with a prominent lawyer being literally stabbed in the back and his housekeeper being shot and thrown out of a fifth-floor hotel window, you spend the majority of the play time searching for a woman on a train who seemingly has no relation to the murder or the political dealings that are happening. This is not to say it has no stakes! It quickly becomes clear that something is going on when everyone on the train acts as though the woman that Emma had lunch with does not (and never did) exist. But it takes a while before it brings these things full-circle, and with so short of a runtime, it feels a lot like "nothing is happening, nothing is happening, EVERYTHING IS HAPPENING."
I don't like to comment on price too much, because these indie devs deserve your dollars for their hard work, but $20 is admittedly a little steep for what's on offer here. I had no problem with it because I'm an FDC junkie, but I think for most people, paying 20 bucks for what is essentially a single Ace Attorney case is going to be a bit much. Like with Darkest Files, knowing what you're getting into is important so you don't get burned by the runtime.
of the Devil, Episode 2
You know, I was planning on wrapping this up with Misericorde Vol 2, but something about it just doesn't grab my attention at all. I've tried three times now, each time playing one of the game's roughly 30-minute chapters before being like "yeah, I'm good," and playing something else instead. Alas, then Prime 4 dropped, I got Assassin's Creed, and then just before Christmas, here comes nth Circle Studios to eat their lunch.
I wrote about Episode 1 back in March, and fundamentally, nothing's really changed. Episode 2 shifts the focus to (in-?)fighting between two of the major organized crime groups, as Morgan gets cold-called and asked to defend Sosuke Ikariya - head of security for the mighty Ikariya Financial Group - after he's accused of killing four gang members and a cop for good measure. Once again, the game deftly weaves between shitposts about F. Scott Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby and biting political commentary about the nature of capital, power, and the police, all while also delivering a competent Ace Attorney-inspired game that asks you to figure out which piece of evidence you have will refute the prosecution's logical argument. I don't know if they've updated their mechanics or clarified some of the writing since Episode 1, but I can say that I only really got stuck in one place during the trial this time around, so there was much less save-scumming to break the game's flow.
Beyond that, there really isn't much else to say. It's more of the Devil, for good or ill, and if you've played the demo, you know damn well if this is something for you or not. Episode 2 clocked in slightly longer than Episode 1 (at seven hours to Ep 1's six), and while I enjoyed the actual story being told more than Ep 1's, I do have to admit that the actual cast of characters was a bit lacking in comparison. Emma, Reyes and London, and Serra return as full-time cast members, but Serra is really the only one of them that gets to shine. Reyes and London spend most of the episode being sidelined in favor of the new cast, and while Han is...okay, I guess(?), pretty the much the entirety of the Ikariya clan that you interact with are exactly what you're imagining when I say that they're Asian corporate-typed Yakuza, and not in a good way. If I never have to hear from Makoto again, it will still be too soon.
Loved it, easily one of my favorite games of the year when it's combined with Episodes 0 and 1, and all for a hair under $20 right now. Go play it! If you like this style of game at all, you'll be glad you did.