Card Detective Reviews

I tried really hard to justify giving this game a positive review, because I want to encourage indie devs to make more games. Unfortunately, in this case, it seems like this game is gonna be a case study in the importance of polish and proper translation. So for the new folks thinking of buying this game, you play as a reporter investigating an incident at a construction site. Cutscenes are in a "comic book"-style, and gameplay consists of the deck-building and the interview card game. There's also a cafe screen, which functions as a menu for side-interviews or proceeding with the main story. Here's the negative parts: * Technical issues. The game is really slow & unresponsive at times. I'll click on the New Game button, and nothing happens for several seconds. Anecdotally, it tends to happen when the game language is set to English for me. Your mileage may vary. The game just has a really aggressive autosave system that just puts you right back where you left off. When I shutdown the game in the middle of a cutscene because I want to change language settings, upon restarting, the game bypasses the main menu and goes right back in the middle of that same cutscene. And you can't access the settings during cutscenes. You might like it; I did not. * The game is fairly short, covering only a single case. I paid less than 5 bucks for it, so I'm honestly OK with the length. Still, just thought I'd mention it, since I noticed that other gamers tend to value game length over the quality of the experience. * Voice-acting is only available in Chinese, not in English. Again, I paid less than 5 bucks for it, so I'm OK with this. Wish they had just played the Chinese audio over the English text, so you could tell if the character was angry/sad/surprised etc from the tone. * The English translation is terrible. This is the main reason I gave it a negative review. The English translation is inconsistent and confusing. Normally, a translator would lock in the translation for specific nouns and terms, so "health points" don't suddenly turn into "life points" or "stamina points". This also helps avoid duplicates, so you don't get two different spells and a vehicle all named "Fireball". Here, the same word (eg. "questioning") can refer to different concepts, and different words can refer to the same concept (eg. questioning/inquiry). The translator did not decide on a style between "...this deception card's Defense Value will -3..." and "...its defense reduces by 3 points..." It's also really weird how perfect some of the grammar and punctuation is, especially with the very awkward and unnatural phrasing. It feels as though multiple translators worked on this, and none of them actually played through the game with the final translation. You can get "Pray to tell, where are you..." and "I'm the epitome of a good man". Even the same card can have different names in different places: There's a steam achievement called "Done at a Stroke", with the requirements <>. Yeah, the card isn't called "Reject Negation" in the game: It's "Discard the Negative". There's also spelling errors, so they didn't run a spellcheck over the final version of the game. A card can be named "Eliminate Modfcation", card types can be "Strategyt (copy)" etc. (The section here used to be about the Chinese voice-acting vs the in-game text. I removed it.) Conclusion Honestly? For the price of less than a coffee, this game should be great fun for an evening or so. The story is pretty relevant to modern events, the artwork has its own distinctive style, the characters are understandable and the VA is decent for an indie game. Half of those compliments immediately vanish when you switch to the English version. I'd be willing to change this review to positive if the English translation gets fixed, but as of the current version, it's really not a great experience for English players.