Topic: Games you've recently beat

The main puzzles involve you coming to a crime scene and using one of about 3 or 4 futuristic tools to track down clues on the location. The main tool is called something like a ‘reconstructor’ and will holographically recreate the crime scene and make it so you can rewind time and watch pieces of the events as you look through to search for a highlighted clue. Some of the crime scenes (and there’s about… maybe 4 total?) are larger than others and I had a couple times where a clue was across the room and made no sense to the flow of the investigation. Another tool is an X-ray device to try to find the trajectory of a bullet, for example, and another is a UV light to track blood splatters mainly, and then there’s a camera to take pictures of the scene where it just basically is a way to highlight a clue. Seems like there’s another gadget I’m forgetting but you get the idea. The issue is that you have some openness to how you approach a crime scene but yet the game has a particular order of the way things should be uncovered and so there’s no real discovery per se, and even when you connect the dots in the scene it’s not very interesting because you have no connection to any of the victims or suspects. It feels like going through the motions.

The second puzzley gameplay element is the evidence boards where you have pieces of evidence that you have to link together in a chessboard looking hologram. The pieces should connect to tell a bit of the story, but it feels quite random. I was able to link and complete each of the boards (maybe about 3 or 4 of these too, iirc) without looking them up, but I’ll be honest that it was just pure guesswork until the clues clicked.

These things do somewhat feel ‘bolted on’, in the end, as a way to promote the feeling of uncovering things yourself. As it turns out, I feel like I would have enjoyed it more if it was a true walking sim or a simpler ‘choose your response’ type of game like a Telltale-like.

There is dialogue choices too, which unlock parts of the story and lead toward which ending you get. Some of the environment is interactive and you can pick things up, open and close doors, hit a few buttons, and just basically interact with some environmental storytelling for filling in the gaps. I’m not a fan of having to read a lot of stuff or interact with optional content in order to get the main storyline. Those things should be optional and the main story should make sense without them. For whatever reason, I had trouble following the story and some of that may be on me for playing it spread out and not paying attention very well. With people jumping into new bodies and since you never really interact with anyone, you’re getting all this stuff second hand, it’s hard to keep track of who’s who and what their motives are.