Feline Forensics and the Meowseum Mystery

You know those "fill in the blanks" deduction games? It always feels slightly annoying, right? Like you know what happened, you just don't have the exact correct wording to satisfy the game. Now imagine the same, but you only have controller or keyboard, and instead of having to do deductions yourself, the NPCs straight up tell you what to put in there, so there are actually no deductions to make and you JUST have to fight trying to find the words the game wants. And when I say "the NPCs tell you" they literally say "yes, I am the culprit, and this is what I did:". Also: buggy. Had to force quit the game multiple times because UI would not close anymore. Then, the UI insists of exiting you out of conversation completely when pressing back, or out of the clue screen when you make a wrong deduction. When you go back to the clue screen, you cannot select clues anymore.

Genuinely an incredible game 10/10. The entire mystery was fun to unravel and each character had their own impact on the story itself. The only thing missing is voice acting for the characters but me and my buddies had fun trying to voice them out ourselves.

Look, I love that the publisher is all about cats and “raising awareness on adoption and rescue”, but they’ve literally just been churning out piles of hidden object search slop and are now suddenly publishing a detective game? It’s nice of them to use their slop platform to raise others up, but they didn’t do a great job because it doesn’t look like this game hit its targets. Other than the cat theme…this was not a good fit. The target audience for games like this is capricious, difficult to reach, and neurotic. You can have all the great reviews in the world from people who like you or the “it’s cute” crowd but that’s an unfocused demographic that feasts on slop like whatever this publisher turns out, not on quality detective games like this was intended to be. This doesn’t really have much bearing on my opinion of the game but I wanted to get ahead of my own guilt criticizing a game published by six cats. It also is a bit of a wag of the finger at the publisher for not providing better support (by directing this developer to a publisher that knows how to corral the psychopaths that come out in numbers for detective games). FFatMM is a duck detective clone with none of the charm. I got 45 minutes in before I lost interest in the story. I avoided my steam deck for a while to avoid having to suffer through this to the end before I pulled the bandage off today. In short, (1) I wasn’t invested in any of the characters. (2) The fill in the blanks segments were incredibly tedious. (3) The rest of the investigation UI/UX was not much better. In tall, (1) The story was not engaging. I don’t like the main character. They’re not funny, likable, or consistently written. Neither was any other character in the game. Occasionally wavy or shaky text was peak personality for any of them. I didn’t sign up to play “locked in a museum of unimaginative children with compulsive lying problems” simulator. I can’t get into more detailed criticisms of the characters without spoiling the game but if I’m feeling better later I might post a long angry rant about them on the discussion boards. (2) The mid-late game fill in the blank segments were all “The ________, and ________ but _________. ________ _______ or ________. So, ________ _______ _________.” Ok bro, you can’t just phone it in with blanks like this and leave out every noun, verb, or adjective. Adding a little doodle doesn’t absolve you of the responsibility of putting in some effort balancing out your clues, the blanks, and the rest of the text. (3) The rest of the games UI/UX wasn’t any better. You get a list of statements for each suspect you’ve interviewed and by default the game tells you which ones you should dispute. It wasn’t at all clear you could turn off this game breaking hint system and why was this on by default?? Also you just choose which person or object contradicts the statement without choosing why, which just makes the whole mechanic another waste of reading time. The dialog structure was also awful and there was no reason it should have been. The way these should be structured is a solved problem. Developer tried to recreate the wheel and built a triangle with 5 sides instead. For example, the tutorial area has a desk, selecting the desk brings up the option to use the phone or use the computer. If you try to use either, you get a “nahhhhhh I won’t.” Ok so why wouldn’t you just nip that in the bud at the start? If all the dialog options are exhausted and you’re not going to let players repeat the conversation or menu tree *don’t let the dialog tree start in the first place*. The accumulation of little inconveniences like this made just getting to the end of the game an exercise in psychic damage. In petty, there are an embarrassing number of typos that aren’t misspellings, just sloppy quality control (“guilty conscious,” “frail apart ,” singular/plural mismatches, etc). I was having a crummy day and could’ve spent it overeating and watching bob’s burgers and I spent it on this game instead. 😡

I like the visual style (apparently inspired by [i]Sin City[/i]), and the story is decent. However, the gameplay unfortunatley doesn't hold up. It's similar to the [i]Duck Detective[/i] games, but the latter have a far better narrative structure (plus, they're fully voice-acted, while dialogue in [i]Feline Forensics[/i] is text-only). It feels like in this game you interview every suspect up front before starting to fill in page after page of cloze puzzles. Yes, you talk to the suspects again in between to corroborate things, but that's miniscule compared to the bulk you do up front. Also, putting the words into the cloze puzzles is rather tedious. Not only do you have to use controller or keyboard (no mouse support), but the puzzles themselves feel like you're trying to reconstruct files that were redacted by the CIA. Bottom line: Not a terrible game, but it's [i]way[/i] more tedious than it should be, so I can't recommend. The [i]Duck Detective[/i] games offer a far better experience. Rating: ★★★☆☆

Nice Golden Idol-like. Cool cat.

A cute game with a fun little mystery, if a bit fiddly. Sometimes it was very tricky to properly examine pieces of evidence even when I knew what part was important, because I couldn't quite get the "eye" symbol needed to officially record it to pop up. For a couple I resorted to watching someone's playthrough on YouTube to figure out exactly which angle to turn the evidence to so that the eye would appear, before realizing the game has a built-in system to handle that. I also struggled with some of the fill-in-the-blanks, when I had what I believe were perfectly valid alternate solutions that were not recognized by the game. However, the game does include a simple hint/auto-fill system that is easy to turn on and off (and doesn't impact achievements) so you don't have to get stuck when your brain doesn't work quite the same way as the developer's. Also, the developer has stated they are continuing to add alternate solutions so who knows, maybe at some point the game would actually recognize my solutions! All in all, a decent way to spend a few hours.

an entertaining cat detective game! 7/10

A fun little detective game, where you solve mysteries by filling in the missing words of various scenarios to explain the events of the night, in a manner similar to Duck Detective or the Golden Idol games. On top of that, you need to find discrepancies between different character's testimonies, and there's some light exploration of the museum that the game takes place in. The game's greatest strength is the dialogue from the colourful cast of characters. Everyone has a motive for the theft at the museum, and everyone's got at least a few secrets to hide from the detective. The detective himself is a funny lil' guy, and generally has something witty to say at every turn. The 'fill in the blanks' puzzles aren't as fun as the ones in the similar titles mentioned above. Some of the templates are awfully vague, although there's a few hints among them in the shape of some little doodles on the notebook pages. The possible words that can be entered are separated into categories (people, locations etc) and you have to keep flipping between different pages to see them. This makes it harder to organise your thoughts than if every possible word was visible at once. The game has no mouse support, only controller or keyboard. Entering 30-odd words to complete a notebook page was something of a chore. I also came across situations where two very similar words could be entered but only one was correct. The dev is aware of this and looking to change it though. (EDIT - Alternate solutions are now in the game.) The soundtrack gets a thumb up - it's your standard 'noir-detective jazz' fare, but I didn't get tired of it over the four hours or so that the game took to complete. All in all, it's a fun game, and I'm looking forward to solving more mysteries with the detective in the future.

I don't exactly know how I feel about this game*, but I know that I did enjoy it. My overall thoughts are that it's a great detective game with a very solid story, and a few annoying moments and odd choices. The art style is very good, and the dialogue is well written (with the one exception being the podcaster, I don't love the way she was characterized as she felt a bit one-dimensional), but the puzzles were a relatively mixed bag. I really enjoyed looking through the environment, finding clues, disputing statements, and interrogating suspects, but some of the Golden-Idol style fill in the blank story pages were really frustrating. In Case of the Golden Idol, you're given a limited set of words for each case, which helps make it so that there's only one way to word the correct solution. This means that the only barrier to solving the case is figuring out what happened, as once you know the exact order of events there's only one way to phrase everything. This game has a set of words that you use and add onto throughout the game as you discover more information, which means that sometimes you'll know exactly what happened but won't be able to move on because you didn't phrase it the way the game wanted you to (such as needing to say that [spoiler]someone hid something somewhere rather than saying they stashed it somewhere or saying that something happened in the courtyard rather than the balcony when it happened on the courtyard balcony[/spoiler]). Ultimately, while this doesn't completely ruin the game, it does make some puzzles a lot less satisfying to solve as you don't get the instant satisfaction of getting the info correct once you figure out what happened. Still, despite this, I thoroughly enjoyed my time with this game and would recommend it to anyone who enjoys the detective genre. 7/10 Edit: It would appear that the dev saw my criticism (or criticism like it) and added a feature for the puzzles to check for alternate solutions! While I really wish this had been in the game when I first played it, this makes my prior criticism functionally useless, but I don't feel like rewriting my entire review so I'm not going to. It does, however, change my final rating to an 8.5/10. I 100% think this game is worth your time, and I look forward to anything this dev releases in the future! *In case it wasn't evident in my edit, I've given my thoughts on this game some time to simmer and I now think that I know how I feel about this game: it's really good, and while it may not be another Obra Dinn or Golden Idol, it's still worth your time and money.

Another game I'm kind of torn on. I had fun playing it, but often it felt overwhelming. Too overwhelming. The moment I stepped into the museum I had so many possibilties, I didn't know where to start. And getting through all the dialogues just to get somewhere to start was pretty tiring. Then the blanks in the notebook. Even when I understood the plot I often was unable to fill the gaps correctly. I feel like they are either to vague or maybe not have half the sentence in blanks so the player can figure out better which word goes where. Honestly I only was able to enjoy the game because of the auto fill-in option. I just couldn't be bothered after stage 1. So not fun. And while I love the accessibility option like the auto fill-in I mentioned above - there is absolutely no clue system for props in the museum you need to interact with. The worst part is, you can't interact with them from the beginning. You need to have enough progress in the story to be able to interact with them. Oh boy have I been stuck in between until I accidentally figured that out. Anyways, I loved the characters and how none of them is too suspicious or too innocent. The plot took it turns in unexpected ways, great! Also amazing references for the museums exhibits. I think the TV remote was my favorite. :D