I'd give this a mid rating if I could, the price is fine for the latter two games in my currency, probably not worth it in american bucks. The first two game store pages point out that they are short, but the first title was really pushing it for me. You can buy them in a pack at a discount and I don't see why you'd ever buy just one of these, they are all very much connected in their narrative and don't really work when not played in sequence.
It's more like one game, split into 3 episodes for no good reason, other than to have attractive 5$ price tag.
The gameplay is a series of very kids friendly puzzle sequences, interviewing everyone in the area, grabbing a thing or two you find, then going through a chain of exchanging items with these characters, until you arrive at a location that reveals the explanation for the current chapter's mystery.
Second game introduces a notebook item to better keep track of these item exchanges, the third one adds a scooter to drive through the town, as well as a short sequence where you throw powder around to reveal prints.
It's not technically a walking sim, but it is as far from a challenging puzzle game as possible, as I mentioned - very child friendly, nothing wrong with that.
Going back to length, the second and third cases are about an hour long, like advertized on the tin, the first one however is more like half an hour experience at best. I would not recommend the first one at all, not only because it's short but because all the environments and even puzzle chains are all of less quality than the later two games. It's a linear story however so it's still best to play all 3.
While the stories behind the mysteries are rather silly and simple, the actual dialogue I found to be quite fun. It had some neat word play at times, decent humor too, in different styles - awkward, self aware, naturalistic and a few times even low-key morbid.
Sound wasn't impressive, the music isn't grating, even in the first one where variety suffered. The sound effects are a bit sparse, but also nothing badly mixed in its volume. No voice acting, but I don't find that to be a negative, especially since the cartoon characters could've sounded obnoxious, and thus ruining some of the good jokes. In the last game the ending track had vocals, I think that was the only exception afair.
Visuals are simple and charming, once again, the first game had a much worse presentation than the next two. While the models are low poly, with solid color textures for the most part, the animations were surprisingly smooth, I think they might've been mo-capped store assets for things like walk cycles or all the different dances at the end of each chapter. If I'm wrong here then I am actually curious if they were made by hand, because that would be pretty impressive for that cheap of a game.
So yeah, if you want a game for your kids, I think this is pretty good for them, plus you can have some chuckles while reading the dialogues for your child. I don't think I'd really recommend it to anyone else though, cozyslop audience is an obnoxious crowd, so I'd rather they stay away from this, but I bet quite a few found their way here.
