Gumshoe Detective Agency: The First Case

Love the whole vibe - definitely needs a bit more polishing but ultimately a cute puzzle game! Looking forward to what's next :)

I cannot wait for more! I loved this style of game, I was so excited that this type of research came so easily to me, finally a use for all my weird Gen Z internet research abilities and nancy playing skills. There were some knots in a few places, but the only one that really became a problem for me was the shape and color puzzle, since there were multiple answers to the puzzle I got a little frustrated. Other wise, THIS WAS SO SO MUCH FUN TY TO THE CREATOR, BIRDY!

This game was so fun! I felt like I was back in the 90s playing a Nancy Drew or Missing Case Files game: the music, the clues, the puzzles. The puzzles were challenging but always solvable, the graphics were great, there was humor--overall, a great game to play, and I recommend it.

I'm a big fan of cozy mystery games (and have played every ND game plus Roottrees, both listed as inspiration sources for Gumshoe), and this was a fun game to spend a quiet evening with! I will also always go out of my way to support independent developers in their projects because I want the cozy mystery/adventure game community to thrive! Shoutout to the NDRevival subreddit for keeping me up to speed on upcoming and new releases. The difficulty level is fairly easy and thus the game was a quick play, but it was still enjoyable. While there is no copy-paste (as others have mentioned), I did enjoy (and prefer) taking pen and paper notes to keep track of my leads. I love the old school 90's web interface, and I especially enjoyed the digital version of sneaking past locked doors. I think this was a really solid first installment of hopefully many future Gumshoe mysteries. I'd love to see a more expansive storyline, more searchable queries and red herrings, buried ledes, and just in general more dots to connect! This game definitely had those, (plus some fun puzzles!), I would just love to see more in future games. Bravo to Birdy Interactive on their first game, can't wait for more!

A short game similar in concept to Roottrees are Dead where you use a fake search engine to gather clues. There are issues with this game, no copy/paste functionality or history being one of them. However the atmosphere and storytelling of this game were enjoyable. There were two scenarios where I needed to lookup a guide however, I had the information and context clues it was just a little leap in logic I was missing. I do hesitate to recommend it at the price due to the short length(1-2 hours) but I do think you can enjoy this game if you are fans of the detective/mystery genre.

A really fun and cozy short-and-sweet detective/mystery game that takes place in the 90s, using 90s computer aesthetics. From a beginner’s perspective, as someone who has never played any Nancy Drew, Professor Layton, or other detective games, I would say this is a perfect game to start with. The puzzles are quite simple. They took me a while, but that's because I'm dumb. I can imagine that those who have been dabbling in puzzle or mystery games for some time would easily breeze through them. The internet aspect is also quite immersive. Having to type your queries manually into the search engine and seeing the Web 1.0 designs made me feel nostalgic for a past I never actually experienced. My main criticism would be the Notepad feature. Although I can tolerate having to manually visit websites (I believe tabs weren’t a thing back then), the Notepad is a massive clunkfest. Copy-paste seems to work, but it completely breaks the thing. Resizing the Notepad window is also a mess, by the end of the game, the window had become the size of a very long mobile app, which I could no longer adjust because it was too tall and the window’s resize handle was off-screen. So I had to deal with using the very narrow smol Notepad app. Since this is their first game, I believe the next installments of Gumshoe Detective Agency will be more expansive and polished than this one. You can watch me completing the game on my YT channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emlaph-0znQ

its quite short and simple. The format somehow feels like its not made for computer? I had to restart it because it could input Ctrl+V but not me typing in the search. When you up the font size (which is an option on bottom right) you can't see/click a option on one of the websites that you need to progress the story. I'm not sure if this was a font issue too but I couldn't see all the clues on the board either at the end while making deductions. Only being able to have one window up and having to sign in over and over again onto mason industries was annoying. The game isn't terrible but it wasn't fun to play.