Case Files: The Death of Paulette Williams

Waste of money and time. Watch an hour of video make 3 decisions and BOOM end of game.

[b]case files: the death of paulette williams[/b] is the first in a planned series of detective adventures. it's kinda like [b]her story[/b] but with some actual gameplay instead of just watching random scenes, then drawing your own conclusions outside the game. supports vr, couldn't care less, you'll have to look elsewhere for info on that. paulette williams was an old lady, now she's a dead lady. some of her meds are missing, her caretakers (the daughter, samantha, and her hubby, elliot) are the suspects because that's how it usually goes. naturally, the daughter has a lot of debt, paulette had hefty life insurance and samantha already booked a one-way ticket to costa rica. so yeah, the usual stuff to kick things off with. you're a cop tasked with figuring out whodunnit by watching your co-worker conduct 'real-time' interviews, occasionally talking to each other about the case and going back and forth in the recorded footage to find clues and whatnot. you can also walk around the office anytime, look at documents and take notes on the whiteboard or the notebook. I was surprised to find that regular hotkeys like shift+arrows to select and copy-paste also work, not that it'd be extremely useful here. and not only is there some gameplay, there are [b]multiple endings[/b] (7 total) as well, based on decisions and conclusions made. acting is better than I expected, mostly on par with other fmv games that presumably had a lower budget (the detective is the writer, director and programmer). as a person who likes to take their time, [b]I found the real-time aspect incredibly annoying and stressful, until it turned out it's not as bad as it first seems[/b]. you see, after the intro both suspects get grilled for a bit, that's nearly half an hour of footage with only a brief break between them, the next one starting automatically, so I figured this is the whole game. however, [b]after the initial interviews you can decide when to trigger the next segment[/b], much like in a regular interactive movie that lets you pause while making a decision (because the trigger here is also a decision, instructing your colleague how to proceed). there's [b]no time limit[/b] and you can [b]pause the game anytime[/b], which is sadly becoming more and more of a niche 'feature', as devs are getting lazier and lazier. you can also [b]quit anytime without losing progress[/b], plus there are autosaves after each clip and decision. [b]scene skip can be enabled from the start[/b], works on unseen footage as well. always handy in games like this, where hunting alternate scenes or endings involves repeated content. in fact, having to wait for the next scene to start after a skip and listening to the [b]unskippable phone calls[/b] over and over during replays became the ultimate annoyances. [b]controls aren't rebindable[/b] but after a patch they're shown in the menu. both wasd and arrows move, mouse looks around, left click interacts, hold right click to zoom in, w/s moves zoomed in documents up/down (this one eluded me, the wheel should do the same), another left click puts them back. there should be axis flips for the mouse at the very least. settings barely existed on release but got improved later. they're available while playing and include resolution options and quality, windowed mode and volume settings. the videos are subtitled in english, can be turned off along with the audio with the in-game control panel. you can turn on some background music on your phone too. starting a new game vipes the current and only save, but once the case is done there's nothing to do anyway. a playthrough [b]takes less than an hour[/b], going down different paths and finding the other endings adds more playtime, though scene skip will make short work of the whole process. still, not too bad for an fmv, even without much interactivity. look at a few things, make a few decisions, then try again. [b]as a fan of fmv in general, I enjoyed it for what it was and I'm looking forward to future titles[/b], possibly introducing new mechanics and stuff.

PROs - Well-written. - Good actors. - Love the room. - The questions given were pretty good. CONs - Waaaaay too short! (Can finish the game in 1h easy) - Need more options for questions. - Need the questions to be more customized. Allow keyboard entry to some degree. This was even possible back in the Commodore 64 days. They should have used it. - Need MORE questions to make the story last longer. - Way too quick in interrogating. Should provide more possible scenarios and allow more amounts interrogation. - Need more interaction in the room. My Synopsis: - Felt real-ish (although I never had seen an actual tear on their cheeks). - Good story line. - Appreciated the note-taking. - The room was pretty cool ...BUT, the game isn't worth the money due to how quickly it can be solved. It's on the right path, but maybe it needs a very quick DLC to not lose any immediate fans to expand the story line or add in more characters. For example, why are we not interrogating the other guy, Michael? If we cannot believe anything they say, based on our limited info he should be there. Seems fishy to me and a giant hole in the plot. It had good potential and they're definitely on to something, and what I did play I enjoyed. I'd give it a 6/10. If were maybe $2 I'd recommend it, but it's not currently.

This game is much shorter and limited compared to the new one. I wish I had played it first. This case is about an elderly murder, a woman named Paulette, and the prime suspects are her daughter, Samanth, and her husband, Elliot. Both of them are caretakers of the woman who died, along with a male nurse. Read the reports, write down notes, watch how they are reacting to questions, and give hints and decisions to your friend who is interrogating them. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3627500513 The gameplay is straightforward; you watch a set of videos (Interviews) and proceed based on your decisions. There are multiple endings, but only one true ending if you get all the facts right. The in-game notepad and whiteboard are helpful, especially if you like streaming games and keeping your viewers engaged. The only background music comes from the music player on the table; you can switch it on or off. The acting wasn't the best in this one; I found the female actress less convincing than the male actor. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3627500569 Pros: +Ok story. +Murder mystery. +Detective style of reading notes. +Multiple endings. +Steam achievements. Cons: -You are only in one room doing everything from there. -Midcore acting. Since this one is their first game in the series, I'm going to give it a neutral rating, not the best, but a good start. I prefer their newer game. [i]Other Reviews: [url=https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198071375554/recommended/2659650/]Case Files: Behind Closed Doors Review[/url] [url=https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198071375554/recommended/3233260/]Case Files: Internal Affairs Review[/url] [/i] [quote]𝐹𝑜𝑟 𝑚𝑜𝑟𝑒 𝑟𝑒𝑣𝑖𝑒𝑤𝑠 𝑐𝘩𝑒𝑐𝑘 𝑚𝑦 𝑐𝑢𝑟𝑎𝑡𝑜𝑟 𝑝𝑎𝑔𝑒 [url=http://store.steampowered.com/curator/32399565/]𝐹𝑒𝑒𝑛𝑎'𝑠 𝐶𝘩𝑜𝑖𝑐𝑒[/url][/quote] [quote][url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/32732116-IndieGems/] Follow [b]IndieGems[/b] [/url] for more reviews like this one. [/quote]

Short and unsatisfying mystery adventure with very little interaction. There's a 3d-rendered room you can walk around in which you can interact with a few things, but not even everything you think you should be able to. Mostly, you watch video clips from 6 to 15 minutes long approximately. You do not ask the questions to the only two suspects, another person does. You only get to make three choices throughout. How to interrogate Samantha in the follow-up interview, how to interrogate Elliot in the follow-up interview and who to charge at the end. I also think the truth is disappointing, relying on guesswork to get it. I'll say that the acting by Samantha was good while it was acceptable for the other two actors.

[h1]Experienced on the Meta Quest 2[/h1] You can view my review & gameplay here: https://youtu.be/0dTRBe_Aqig This is the most realistic police interrogation game that I have ever played. As a lawyer, I have seen several police interrogation videos and this is pretty realistic take on how interrogations usually go. In part of this narrative, the police are using the Reid Technique, which is known to elicit false confessions. However, while this is a very realistic dramatization of a police interrogation on a murder mystery, there is very little gameplay. VR really doesn't bring much to the experience either. So this experience isn't for everyone. You're basically in a 3D environment, watching 2D videos on a computer screen. You can skip the video and then fast forward or rewind or pause. You make some choices as well. There are 8 total endings. However, a lot of the video content is repeated which you'll notice if you do more than one playthrough. You'll have to skip the video portions which you've already seen, which isn't easy because you can't really know what you're skipping through, so you just have to skip a little at a time and just kind of guess. You do have full locomotion and teleportation available, along with smooth or snap turning. You can easily set your height with joystick pushes on your motion controllers. Most of the VR interactions are very basic, touch and hold to select or grabbing the markers to write down on the white board. You can play seated or standing. Overall, I enjoyed this very much as a lawyer. This is more fun than most real-life video confessions (that's the unrealistic part). The actors all did a great job, including the dev who acted, wrote, & directed this. But this experience isn't for everyone and if you're expecting more of a game, than a realistic police interrogation, you may be disappointed. [u]It took me about 1 hour to finish my first playthrough.[/u] [b]Rate 6.5/10.[/b] [quote]Please note: I received a free Steam key through the Steam Curator Connect program. You can join my Steam Curator group, Oculus Rift Reviews, here: https://steamcommunity.com/groups/Oculus_WMR [/quote]

This game is more about guessing and hoping for some random outcome than any information gathering on the part of the player. You cant really operate or make any clear or solid assumptions based on the evidence given in the "interrogation" or the irrelevant documents on the table. I only have nearly 4 hours of game time due to the fact I did this on shift at work. Wouldn't recommend if you're looking for a detective or interrogation style game.

"Case Files: The Death of Paulette Williams" is an interactive movie depicting police interrogations with two murder suspects. It is fairly short (approximately 1h per playthrough), limited to one single room, and only offers 3 decisions to the player, but I found the story interesting and the acting quite good. [h2]1. Story & Setting[/h2] A terminally ill woman, who lived at home with her daughter and son-in-law, died to an overdose of her medication. A police officer interrogates the couple to find out how that could happen. Your job is to watch those interviews and, at 3 points in the game, decide how to go on. There isn't anything spectacular to the story, but that's fine - the objective was to depict a realistic scenario, and the game succeeds at that. I felt immersed in the situation, and enjoyed analyzing the suspects' reactions and juggling different possible explanations in my head. I found the mystery fairly easy to crack, though, and apparently succeeded in my first playthrough. [h2]2. Gameplay & Mechanics[/h2] There is almost no gameplay to speak of. Three times throughout the story, the police officer will ask you how to go on, and you can choose between two options (the first two times) resp. four (the third time). Optionally, the game offers you a notepad and a whiteboard to write to. That's a nice touch, but there aren't many details to keep track of in this case, so personally I saw no reason to use them. There are also some case-relevant documents to look at, but they don't tell you anything important that you couldn't also gather from the interviews. You can also rewatch the interviews as often as you like, but if you've been decently observant the first time, then the recordings won't tell you anything you haven't already seen. This is not a game where you need to scrutinize footage for hidden cues. I didn't use that feature at all and nevertheless "cracked" the case with little effort. [h2]3. Graphics & Presentation[/h2] The movie clips are competently filmed, though to be fair, that wasn't really a challenge. All scenes are filmed in the same, well-lit, mostly empty interrogation room through two static cameras, one focused on the suspect and one showing the entire room. Regardless, it's nice that there weren't any cinematic mistakes, and the type of presentation was a good fit for the story, it felt immersive and plausible. The acting was very good. The actors depicted emotions like insecurity, sadness, being guarded, or feeling uncomfortable, very well and resisted the temptation to overact. This fits well into the generally realistic setting and atmosphere. There aren't any overtly dramatic scenes like people shouting or fighting, but once again, the game aimed for realistic interactions, and succeeded at that. The actors deserve special recognition for maintaining their realistic performances throughout long uninterrupted scenes of up to 20 minutes - this is not a setup where mistakes could have been easily corrected by a cut and a 10-second reshoot. On the technical level, the recording of the voices is competently done as well. [h2]4. Usability & Accessibility[/h2] The game was designed for VR, but can also be played on a regular setup, which is what I did. The UI still feels like a VR game (you focus your view on an object and click, rather than moving a mouse pointer on the screen), but I found it intuitive and comfortable to use, and there isn't much interaction in the game anyway. One part that I did not like is that the videos only display on a monitor in a room that your character is in - there doesn't seem to be an option to make the video use my entire screen. Even when I get as close as possible to the in-game monitor, the image on that monitor fills only half of the viewport. There are settings for resolution and quality, windowed mode, subtitles, and a volume slider. You can also toggle a setting to enable scene skipping, which is a feature that FMV games absolutely require to maintain any replay value, but many don't provide. For this game, it's still not perfect because your phone calls with the officers are not skippable, but exploring different outcomes by replaying the game and taking different choices was generally viable and interesting. You can pause the game anytime, which is useful when you need to quickly address something in real life while a scene is playing. Contrary to many other movie-like games, this one respects the player's time and acknowledges that not all players can guarantee 20 uninterrupted minutes when they sit down to play a game. While the game does provide subtitles, there are no closed captions, so if a player is deaf or hard of hearing, they might miss some of the sighs or heavy breathing - though I think that you'll still be able to see what's going on just by watching the facial expressions. Keyboard controls are fixed to WASD and cannot be rebound, but you only ever need the mouse and occasionally the "w" key (for moving forward in your room), so this shouldn't be a problem for the majority of players that usually need or want to rebind keys. [h2]5. Conclusion[/h2] For a short, realistic "police interrogation" game with little interaction, this game works pretty well. If you want a game with more player agency or a complex mystery, then you won't find that here. But if those elements aren't necessities for you to enjoy a game, then you'll find a competently done, relatively simple murder mystery on a realistic contemporary case, with believable interrogations. The game's price is also very fair for what it offers.

[code]For other game reviews, please [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/40640212/]follow us at What The Game?[/url][/code] Case Files-The Death of Paulette Williams is an FMV detective game that's notable for two things: its short length and its multiple endings. For what it's worth, while it's marketed as a detective game, it's got more in common with an interactive movie or a visual novel than an actual detective game. There's little to say about the controls, beyond that they work as intended, are straightforward, and intuitive. The sound is minimally important – you're literally only watching police interviews, so there's nothing hidden that requires you to find anything in a scene or anything like that. The actors all do a good job in their roles, with none of the three turning in a bad performance. You're set up as a secondary player in this, watching the interviews and then guiding both the direction the police detective takes them, and also can take notes on what they say, or things you might find inconsistent. Where it all breaks down, however, is how little interactivity there actually is. Sure, you have both a notepad and a whiteboard, but it doesn't matter – it's just window dressing. You don't actually have to figure anything out. You'll watch an interview or two, and then the detective will call you and ask how you think he should proceed. Then you'll watch another interview or two, and he'll ask how you think he should proceed. You can't say “Hey, ask her about X,” or “Hey, she said X, but he said Y. Focus on that.” It's essentially a choose your own adventure game with police detective window dressing. Worse yet, you don't know what the cop is actually going to do. An early choice I made literally had him badgering one of the suspects into confessing, and him literally dictating their words. That was definitely NOT what I'd wanted him to do, but he went over the top with it. It was unsatisfying to realize there's literally no reason to take a single note. Why did I bother replaying prior videos (you're encouraged to do this) to find inconsistencies/potential leads, if I can't dictate the direction in finer detail? And of course, if you don't get the ideal ending, the cop will give you a disappointed tone and say “I don't know. I think we got it wrong.” No sir, YOU got it wrong. I literally made two choices and then had to pick what to do, based on your actions. This is on YOU. Of course, multiple endings add a small amount of replay. Your first run will probably take you an hour. Subsequent ones will be shorter, due to the ability to skip videos you've previously seen. (And because you're not taking notes, having learned the futility of doing so.) And here's the thing: if this was meant to be an object lesson about the way police manipulate interrogations with guided questions and prisoner's dilemma style tactics, it succeeds. There's seven in total, though you should probably not expect anything truly wild to happen in any of them. This is a small game made by a small team of new developers. If nothing else, it proves why cooperating with the police isn't in your best interests, because I 100% had a situation where I watched a cop literally bully someone into a confession, and then go “Oops. Maybe mistakes were made.” Thanks for showing me why I should always have a lawyer present, even if things are “voluntary”. Thanks for showing me why I should never answer anything but the question itself and provide no extra information to the police. It might be a great lesson, but it's not a great game. I feel like if there'd been something more – like a section that asked you to justify your logic to the detective, or to help build the case against one or both suspects, this could have been a better experience. Instead, this is just an interactive movie with limited choices, set in a single room. Instead, here's the entire format: 1)Watch two interviews, make a binary decision. 2)Watch another interview, make a binary decision. 3)Watch a final interview, decide the outcome of the case. (Suspect A is charged, Suspect B is charged, neither is charged, both are charged.) None of the endings feel truly earned, because nothing YOU do matters. You can blunder into the right answer through brute force or random luck. I understand that because it's a detective game, there's absolutely a right answer. Given the lack of granular control over the investigation itself or the lines of questioning, it feels empty. It doesn't help that the case itself is pretty mundane, and there's not really much of interest going on peripherally with the suspects. The setup and circumstances of the case are very much grounded in the real world, and everything is very plausible and non-sensationalistic, but I'm not sure that makes it particularly interesting, as far as making it the focus of the game. On a discount, maybe this is something to purchase if you're on the fence but still intrigued. Fans of FMV games may very well enjoy this at full price. It's an acceptable game, and it's competently made and acted, but it's simply not a very strong one, in my opinion. However, I have spoken with the dev, and they've made it clear that they're taking feedback from players, both positive and negative, and plan to expand upon the formula in the future. They're new, having never done a game like this, so if you're going to communicate your opinions and ideas to them, please be respectful. I feel like there's the potential for real greatness here if they can build upon what they've done so far.

So, first things first, this game is NOT for everyone! It’s not fast paced. You really do have to take it slow. It has a bunch of branching storylines. So far I’ve done two. It took me about two plus hours to get the real ending. The game is basically watching videos and paying attention, then making choices based on what you saw. This is the basic gameplay loop. It has an interesting storyline and good actors. I’d give it a 7 out of 10. This game was pretty good, but there is a lot of stuff that can be improved on. It has great potential for a series. I look forward to future games from these devs.