Scene Investigators Reviews

A bit on the fence here, but downvoting this one (as opposed to also being on the fence but upvoting Painscreek). The concept is good, and the actual cases are interesting... but the characters in the story tend to behave in a strange ways (even considering what they are supposed to be) that make it tricky for players to deduct what went down. Also, one critical issue that sets this game apart from the "best" in this genre (most notably Obra-Dinn and Golden Idols) is the fact that the timing of the scene/who is present doing what is unclear. It's somewhat unclear if it is "a detective at the scene" or "in the middle of the action"... and neither actually makes sense when you really think about it given the evidences in the scene. All-in-all, I'm glad I played it, but cannot really recommend this as a solid mystery/deduction game...

while the concepts had some promise and the investigation was enjoyable, ultimately my biggest issue was the writing. a majority of the scenarios were full of inane stereotypes, especially towards the female characters. the game relied on assumptions that were either impossible or inconceivably out of character/illogical for the character in question. it is fun to play with a friend, but most of the time is spending griping about either the strange clues highlighted or our issues with the writing. it was incredibly disappointing to see mental health demonized and the 'crazy woman' trope used. i would not recommend it because honestly, very rarely did we find the solution worth the effort we went through.

After the Painscreek killings I was looking forward to this one, but I ended up being disappointed, its not that the game is terrible, I'd give this a neutral review if this was possible, but its not. To start off there are some improvements over Painscreek, the game poses more questions in each case. You'll need to get a fuller picture of whats going on to solve the crimes. This is a step up from the devs last game where you needed to get 100% completion to just to confirm an answer you got several hours ago. If you can figure out the crime before finding all the clues then you can solve the case. But chances are you wont, for one the game is littered with red herrings, it makes sense after all we don't want you to brute force an answer straight out the gate, but it also means that you can waste alot of time if you miss an important clue. There really needs to be a highlight interactable button as clues can easily be lost amongst the clutter of set decoration. And sometimes the set decoration is important, but knowing that the bowl on the table is supposed to tell you where the homeowner was sitting there when an intruder broke in and you need to take note, thats a pain. But thats not all alot of clues are unclear, for example theres a case where you can read the back of wine bottle which is supposed to clue you in on the which glasses at the table have been drunk from , in the same case theres a bunch of napkins with red stains around, you can examine these but what are they telling you? is this red wine? Pasta sauce? Blood? I had assumed that the clue was supposed to show who had been poisoned (Case file wont tell you who died, just that it was internal bleeding and the police found the poison that did it on one of the guests, you still need to solve the mystery for some reason though) but no it was just supposed to be wine to idicate that this person had been drinking. It would be simple to have a description when I examine an item to say this is a napkin it has wine stains on it, This glass of wine hasn't been drunk from, the lipstick on this glass is this shade (rather than guessing its probably the same colour as the one in this suspects bag). And then there are cases where the solution seems to leave holes, like someone walking into an apartment shooting someone and the people in the next room not noticing, I thought they must be in on the murder, turns out no it just happened like that. It happened in a few cases where I was convinced the solution was more complex than what was presented only to be disappointed. Its not that all the cases are like this, some of these are good and when it works it works and solving them feels good, but its a mixed bag, and thats not great for the limited size of the game (it took me 7 hours) and I ending up just taking a logical leap and guessing half the time to get the last question for a case. If you are a detective game fan, there are better options out there but this could be worth it as long as you get it on sale.