Doctor Watson - The Riddle of the Catacombs Reviews

"Doctor Watson - The Riddle of the Catacombs" is a godawfully bad first person "hidden object" adventure game that looks a lot like an asset flip to me... I'm fairly sure I've seen most of the structures in this crapfest in other Unity asset flips. Once more you're Sherlock Holme's sidekick, Dr Watson, in the late Victorian era, shuffling around a badly rendered and lazily assembled asset flipped construction yard, walking by the printed packages with the barcodes and the hydraulic factory machines... yeah the developer seriously just ripped off Arthur Conan Doyle in the same way he "borrowed" other people's Unity assets and put his own name on them. It's apalling and morally bankrupt to do this kind of thing. And, surprising nobody, when such unethical people slap together a video game, it's garbage with no serious value for gamers. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. The game features lazy low-polygon "retro" assets, making this look like a barely functional 3D game from the mid 2000s. It's unclear why the developers weren't able to arrange high quality, high polygon count contemporary assets for the game, and also irrelevant... what matters is that this looks bad as a result of their decisions, a compromise PC gamers shouldn't have to put up with. The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers, or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 3 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 50,000 games for gamers to choose from (over 9,000 completely free titles), the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected. The game contains stock/store assets and other packages, but the "developer" here hasn't credited the people who actually did the work for the game. While this isn't necessarily against the license for the use of those assets, claiming the work of others as your own is unethical. "Doctor Watson - The Riddle of the Catacombs" has the comically over-optimistic price of around $4 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the unethical nature of the developer. Remember that if you buy a game from an unethical developer, you're putting your money at risk.

I'm gonna have my gamer licence revoked for what I'm about to say but I actually really enjoyed it. The game walks a tightrope somewhere between "so bad it's good" and "kinda competent" while delivering the quintessential hidden object game experience. Yes, quintessential. All hidden object games are like this, they're just 2D and look pretty. Collect animals, food, and wrenches, most of which are the wrong size, while running around like you have rollerblades on, amongst spooky floating skeletons and death traps that don't actually kill you. What's disappointing is that there's very little story here. I'd love to see the demon gas lore expanded. I don't know if I'm joking or not. First time playthrough: 2 hours 18 minutes 7/10

2 hours in & I haven't yet been able to 'search in drawers for objects, threw a vase from the shelf and have a look behind, or in boxes and chests. Somethimes you have to combine objects to find the required things', it has been for the most part just context-less hidden object scenes of tools, produce or animal figures. It misses the point of hidden-objects in that they are hidden, the objects are just all layed out on shelves or tables around the room, you just have to walk around and find them. There isn't a penalty either, you can just click on every item because there isn't a point & the game doesn't even care if you are playing it properly. There are atrocious fetch quests where you have to wander the entire main hub map finding 16 or 21 screws or worse, shields which are often indistinct circles laying on the ground or on top of blocks & shields on walls which while they are shields aren't the shields you are after & when you get all the objects there isn't really any pay off, just another door opening. The hub maps are windy catacombs with numbered doors, but you don't enter them in sequence, sometimes you open door 1 first & then door 5 which is at the other end of the map is the next one that opens, the game will give you keys but doesn't appear to tell you which door they open (i actually just got told I got a key to Door 9 but there isn't a map & pressing the Hint key just highlights all the remaining puzzles with question marks, not numbers, so even when you are told where to go, you really don't have any idea where that actually is), so you try them all & get a basically identical puzzle to the last one. During one 'match produce to these silhouettes' mini-game, I clicked on everything in the room 4 times before using the Hint button, only to have it highlight an area of the room that was empty of all objects, still clicked it & progressed though. Make that 3 times now, one of the items spawned inside the thickness of a shelf & a second time in the same room, the object the Hint highlighted had spawned beneath the floor. The store page says that there is a story, I would say there is a premise; Doctor Watson gets about 5 lines of explanation at the start as to why you are there & I haven't seen anything further, there aren't notes or other thoughts given by Doctor Watson during the game to show that he is even mildly interested in the weird surroundings he finds himself in, there are skull & skeleton ghosts flying around & laughing at him & he's collecting animals, vegetables & tools for untold reasons & he just keeps going without even a hint of curiousity. The lack of music outside of random, spooky stings every now & again & the "story" is so thin, make this game (so far) feel like I'm being punished for liking the hidden object genre. This almost feels like a rage game, it feels buggy & boring in a way that borders on aggressive & I will finish it out of a grim determination to see if there really is a story & I've already played too long to get a refund. I did finish it & I was right, the ending was of such an anti-climactic, low quality that it feels like I got trolled.