Database Detective: Minor Crimes Division

drop table

Really great game! I had low-ish expectations for it but they were blown out the water. I work in data and found the SQL to be fairly simple but the difficulty curve is paced well and the extremely detailed effort the dev have taken to make the puzzles challenging with various red herrings makes it really fun trying to make sure you have a rock solid case to arrest someone! Do a second game!

in real life. the data you work with is very vague and can be frustrating. but sometimes it is good to work with the basics and enjoy these simple exercises.

I don't like giving a negative review because this game is good for what it is, but wow is it not for me--and this kind of game should be right up my alley. There's just too much going on between the need to phrase the searches correctly (uniquely fun), the need to hunt down information from a lot of different sources (fun, in a way we've seen before), and the bizarre complexity of some of the cases. I had a similar problem with Blue Prince, where I found it incredibly frustrating that I constantly came up with possible answers but couldn't try them out without the game getting in my way. What tips it over the edge as actually negative for me are (1) the lack of quality of life features in the interface (I know it's supposed to be old-school, but it's just mean not to include a browser history function) and (2) the weird, indecipherable (and totally unnecessary) allusions to real-world politics.

[h2] Quick Review[/h2] [b]Overall:[/b] Pretty good game. Fun logic puzzles that can also serve as an okay SQL tutorial for beginners. [h2] More Details [/h2] The puzzles in this are really fun and satisfying to solve. Challenges start very easy but get harder at each sequential level. I had a couple cases where narrowed down the list of potential suspects to a few people and had to guess which one was right, but that could have just been me missing an additional clue somewhere. The little mole man assistant is good at pointing you where you generally need to go to figure out the case, but not so helpful if you hit a very specific roadblock. As a SQL tutorial, this isn't bad. I deal with a decent amount of SQL for work, so I tried a bunch of things just to see if they would work. Most aggregate functions beyond the ones in the in-game manual don't work. No UPPER or LOWER functions to switch string case, which would have been nice at a few points. CONCAT works but you don't really need it, just nice to have. All the dates in the game are expressed as integers, so all SQLite DATE functions aren't available and wouldn't be useful even if they were. This works as a decent beginner SQL tutorial, but only for the absolute basics. Could be improved by adding more SQL functions and datatypes, with puzzles that require the player to use them.

A great little game to learn the basics of SQL and make you feel like Sherlock Holmes when you find the one guy that chewed with their mouth open on a Tuesday at 3pm at the county fair.

this scratched my puzzle/deduction itch, it's also pretty commendable to have a game about teaching SQL without it being too stuffy or too much of a lecture.