Confidential Killings - A Detective Game

I played this after the short but cool "Let Sleeping Dogs Lie". It's available for free so if you are unsure if you want to buy this game, i recommend playing it before. The overall style is very similar. I really liked the artstyle, story and character portrayals of Confidential Killings, I have somewhat mixed feelings about the puzzle design: Overall, I find it well-executed, as it requires deep engagement with the scenarios to piece together the precise connections. However, the mechanic becomes somewhat repetitive after a few cases, and a bit more variety in the investigative process would have been welcome. Interludes like the interrogations added a touch of dynamism to the scenario, yet they ultimately relied on the same "fill-in-the-blank" format. Nevertheless, even though the core puzzle mechanics didn't change much, I still enjoyed immersing myself in the later cases, especially since, by that point, I was keen to follow the characters' fates and see how the various plot threads would come together.

--The good-- - Gorgeous art style. Looks like American comics from last century - Intriguing mystery - Good use of foreshadowing. It gives a good incentive to go back to the early cases and enjoy the hints that were there all along, now with new meaning - I enjoyed the small side puzzles like associating recorded voices with names and organizing the timeline of the massacre - I appreciate the note-taking feature. It's nothing crazy or revolutionary, but it's nice to have (somehow it's not present in the game's inspiration, Golden Idol). I used it a couple of times to make lists of names that I knew for sure didn't apply to a certain unidentified person (e.g. the thief is neither Francisco nor Richards because the letter addressed to him is written by Francisco and mentions Richards as a third party). --The bad-- - A lot of spelling and punctuation errors. Comma splices abound, and "rehearsal" is consistently misspelled as "reharsal" too many times - Mediocre music. It's repetitive and has no substance. The only decent themes are the drug party and the interrogations - The game uses a lot of cliché tropes, as other reviewers have said - The balcony doors in the hotel case map to the wrong rooms. The left door should map to room 3, but it maps to room 1, and viceversa - Character identification in the notebook is too exploitable. All IDs should be verified at the same time, like Golden Idol does, to prevent brute-forcing. Likewise with the small puzzles like the timeline in the massacre case and the Pyramid of Power - There should be a way to leave a character's name slots empty after identifying them wrongly. Right now the wrong names have to stick until you find the correct ones, and this can mess with cross-referencing - [spoiler]Kenneth[/spoiler]'s interrogation reconstruction should allow "the empire [spoiler]Roman/Lipko[/spoiler] built", not just "[spoiler]Dominic/Fraser[/spoiler]". They are the same person, after all. I wasted 15 minutes rereading everything and swapping words in vain, and only learned the answer in a Steam walkthrough - There's no reliable way of identifying Dominic's friends in the last case. Looks are not enough. It's not necessary to complete the game, but still disappointing that this puzzle was poorly designed when all other cases had solid reasoning for the ID process - My game has crashed twice in a full playthrough. Not sure if this is a widespread problem or only mine - Two actors wear scarves in the theater case and it's not obvious who is who just based on that, so I had to take a guess. Not a great puzzle. Not as bad as the Dominic's friends situation, though, because here it's just two possibilities - The Ad Astra case says [spoiler]Tobias[/spoiler] has a bullet in the stomach, but it's clearly in the chest - The sprite for the stamp on the disco case should be mirrored. --Conclusion-- Despite a few flaws I was glued to my seat, quite entertained all the way through. I wish there were more cases.