Gumshoe Detective Agency: The First Case

I love the concept, but oh my GOD the UI is unbearable. Closing a window closes all windows. You can't move windows. Back-button in the browser doesn't send you 1 page back, if you followed links: it sends you to homepage. I can't save the page I opened in a browser: the game decides which pieces of information are "evidence" that can be pinned on the board. And there's no way to access already found pages! The windows where you have to enter something are reset when you reopen, and you have to close and open again because you can't move windows to the back/foreground. The 1990s computer systems the devs are trying to emulate weren't half as bad as this!

Really cool if you like puzzle games where you have to do research. Relatively short game but entertaining nonetheless

Really excited to see this series continue to develop! I had a lot of fun and really liked the integration of puzzles into the search gameplay, which feels like a very cool innovation of the Roottrees format.

I'm sure I don't have anything to say that hasn't already been said by all the other reviewers, but I'll post a review anyway to support the creator. :) This game feels like a good first draft at a Roottrees Are Dead style game. The internet search engine is always a fun mechanic and I like searching through webpages for the clues I need to solve the case, but the way it's been implemented here is very rudimentary compared to the Roottrees system. I hate to compare Gumshoe Detective Agency so heavily to a different game, but many people who might play this will almost certainly have played Roottrees first. So - having played Roottrees myself, a lot of the quality of life features that made the internet search mechanic fun and easy to use were very obviously absent from Gumshoe. Roottrees had a history you could use to quickly backtrack through the pages you'd visited, and the notebook included links for passages you'd highlighted so you could go back and see the passage in context. Not so with Gumshoe; there's no history, and navigating away from the internet browser to look at the case file or other evidence resets your progress back to the search engine when you come back. Apparently the notebook was removed from gameplay at some point after the game's launch, so not only does it not have links, it doesn't exist at all. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. I grew up playing the Nancy Drew Point and Click Adventure games, which all but required players to take notes with paper and pen, so writing down my observations by hand was a fun change of pace. However - the game itself still tells players to use the in-game notebook feature, which is confusing to players who bought the game after the notebook was removed. The internet itself is also a little shallow here in Gumshoe. Roottrees would have at least a short paragraph for just about everything that could be considered a keyword. Gumshoe's inspirations have trained their players to pay attention and pursue every possible lead, even if it doesn't go anywhere, so every page I read added at least five or six new keywords to my list of things to investigate. Unfortunately, only one or two those keywords ever actually went anywhere. The rest just said they couldn't be found, with no flavor text to help build out the world of the Gumshoe Detective Agency. I know it wasn't necessarily relevant to the mystery we were trying to solve, but I would've liked to read a short blurb about the careers of my superior officers, or learn more about some of the extra locations listed on the [spoiler]ghost stories[/spoiler] website. This is a game about reading and immersing yourself in the world, so it's a shame that there wasn't more to read. The story itself is pretty good though. It's a short game, but unraveling some of the twists and turns in the narrative was very fun and satisfying. There was a puzzle here and a password there that required some real leaps of logic to connect to their solutions, but thankfully it wasn't a consistent problem. In short, the basic systems are in place, but they just don't have the same depth or ease of use as the games it claims as inspirations. I love Roottrees and Nancy Drew and I want to see more games like them, so I hope that if the developer chooses to continue the series, they'll take some of their audience's constructive criticism to improve the next game they make. The price is a little steep for how short and small the game is, but I do still recommend playing it. Support the people who make games like these, and use Gumshoe as an example of a good game that could be made better with just a little more time and effort. :)

I really enjoyed this game! It scratched some of the itch I've had since playing Roottrees, Hypnospace Outlaw, and Type Help, though it was a shorter experience. The mystery itself was pretty straightforward so I didn't get hung up on any one puzzle for long, it was a nice breezy game to knock out with a cup of coffee on my morning off. For future titles, having resizable windows and a search history function would help a lot but with my handwritten notes I didn't struggle with the UI. Also maybe options to turn off the clicking sound effect, I didn't realize how often I ambiently click on nothing until I had to hear it in the game audio.

It's a very nice puzzling game in which you really have to try and crack your brain around the things that have happened. I loved to be able to search for clues. In the end, it got a bit confusing but that could also have been me getting too tired to play and forgetting things, haha

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.

Such a fun little game with good deduction, puzzles, and a nicely wrapped-up story! I appreciate the effort that went into creating real webpages (rather than searches leading to text synopses, like in The Roottrees Are Dead). Looking forward to the next one!

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.

WOWWW!! This game was so much fun. Every little detail helped immerse me into the 1995 sleuth vibe - I LOVED it! I totally recommend this game. If you are looking for a fun way to fall back in time and do some old internet sleuthing, this is the game for you. :)