Dragon Detective is a great game in the genre. I would easily recommend it, even at full price.
It's very well written, with characters that have compelling and believable personalities, that are also distinctive without being so extreme as to become silly caricatures. The setting is very interesting, and I wish I could learn more about it. I hope the game gets a sequel, because I would love to see more of this world.
Visually, it has great and distinctive character designs with good art. Background and scene designs are much simpler and less appealing, and a little lacking in variety, but nothing bad.
Good music, nothing crazy, a bit limited maybe.
The actual evidence gathering isn't very difficult at all. It is mostly a matter of finding every element in the scene, and going through each of the 6 senses, and asking every character every question available. The game often won't let you proceed until you've found everything you need. That's generally the norm for all games of this genre though, so it's hard to hold that against it. The last two cases do open up a tiny bit more and allow you to move around the scene more freely, and some senses and questions won't provide useful clues until you've found other clues, and then come back with that new info. I do think the game should have done more of that though, and started it sooner. The game will also allow you to begin piecing clues together to form hypothesizes shortly after the "case begins", and before any clue gathering, so there is some small risk in attempting to do so before you've gathered all required information, but the scenes aren't big or complex enough that that's a real concern, generally, and if you are missing evidence the game will tell you after it dings you're detective score, so it's a mistake you'll make once at most.
One bit of the game I feel could use a bit more work is forming hypotheses and interrogations. Hypotheses are a cool feature, it gets you thinking about the whys and the hows of the case as you go along, rather than just stacking a bunch of mysteries on top of each other and then explaining it all step by step at the very end of the investigations in court, as is often the case in other detective games, like Ace Attorney, and Danganronpa. But, it's almost always easy to figure out what happened (at least the basics of that particular situation, not necessarily the whole case) once you've examined the scene--which isn't a problem. The problem is figuring out which one of the roundabout, vaguely worded clues fits the vaguely worded prompt to explain something that's already obvious to you.
Interrogations are when you take turns debating with a character, presenting arguments and evidence to counter theirs. They're mostly cool too. However, when it's the opponent's turn to respond, often times the right response isn't necessarily being "correct" or "rational", it seems to be to basically either just flatly deny it with a "nuh-uh" or "no u" tier response, or to ignore their argument to straight up threaten them or otherwise make them uncomfortable. Once I even called out an opponent for lying, they admitted that, yeah, they were lying, but so what--and that was considered a composure loss for ME!? Admittedly, the point of interrogations is to undermine your opponent's "composure" while maintaining your own, not be the most "factually correct", but still, the tactics you're seemingly supposed to use seem pretty crude for an investigator, and it's not always obvious what kind of argument Noxly is going to make from the prompts you're provided. Also, Noxly from time to time does that obnoxious thing that detective game protagonists love to do where he'll confidently announce that "THIS" will "explain everything", but then leave you--the player--clueless as to what "THIS" is that he intends to present, or where he's going with an argument. There was also at least one time when the game asked me to make a deduction using information about the fictional world the game takes place in, that it never bothered to inform me of beforehand.
But, that said, I played on "detective" difficulty, which is the harder of the two available, and still got the maximum S rank detective rating, and an average 95 out of 100 on every case without much trouble or ever using even a single hint.
There are only four cases, but they're fairly meaty. I certainly would have liked more, but only because I enjoyed what was there and want more of it, not because I feel unsatisfied. On the contrary, $10 is more than fair for the 30 or so hours I got (albeit some of that playtime was probably me being AFK while the game was running).
