Inspector Waffles

i love the animal yaoi

This is the cutest crime solving game ever. I thought I didn't like games without voice acting but I was so engaged in this game that it didn't even bother me.

Thank you for making this game, i really loved it.

非常棒的解谜、剧情和汉化

This is a cute short point and click adventure. Most of the puzzles were pretty easy to solve but a few were more challenging.

If you're like me, you love cats, and you want a mystery with cats. If so, this game is for you. It has cats and dogs, puns, hyjinks due to their instincts, all that stuff. The point and click puzzles are also satisfying, and I never needed a guide (apart from the secret collectables) because of the in-game help system where you call your mom (a lore reason, ha ha). That said, I don't think the story is very good. Let's get into spoilers! Don't read unless you've already played/don't care. [spoiler] All of chapter 2 (and a lot of 3) is a red-herring. In a good mystery, red-herrings either relate to the themes of the story or lead to a deeper truth. In this game, the red-herrings are just fake evidence planted by the real killer. There's no way you can guess what's actually happening; the truth doesn't feel like "Oh of course it was this way all along." Instead, I was disappointed because I liked the fake story more than the real story. Entering chapter 3 was so good, and then it just was meaningless. And that's 2/5 of your story that feels wasted, and honestly more than 2/5 given chapter length. There is character growth in this section, but in mysteries, we want everything to feel important to learning the truth even if it doesn't relate to the final killer. I also find the characters to be very tropey. Inspector Waffles sure needs to get over their survivor's guilt, but they are overall written as a generic tough-guy detective. There's the police officer who loves donuts. I want tropes in terms of characters act like their animal (like Spotty being an excitable dog!), but not tropes in what the characters' personalities are. Inspector Waffles's toughness also clashes with the silliness of the other characters. You can have humor and serious moments, but it still feels that there's little in-game reason for Waffles to not be silly as well, and that's part of what makes him feel like a generic "woe-is-me" detective. I know that Waffles has PTSD, so it does feel more justified later on, but it still felt tonally weird, especially early on. The game also never addresses the dog-cat speciesm that chapter 2 sets up. Because the plot is fake, it abandons those themes in favor of a hypnosis plot that is thematically less interesting. Yes, the specism in the world is addressed in how Waffles grows to admire Spotty, and that's actually really well done and sweet. But no one seems to acknowledge the specism in the rest of the world, and it's never treated as important. Maybe that's why the game felt tonally strange. Chapter 2 is grounded in exploring a neighborhood of dogs, segregated away from society. We later learn that the only cat here stays purely because they're poor; cat's don't willingly live with dogs. This is seen as funny later in some of the humor, but in Chapter 3, it's played very seriously, for there is a cult that believes in the superiority of cats. Finding this cult feels right because there's been subtle specism throughout all of chapter 2. So when the cult is thrown out as "fake," we throw out the game actually questioning the problematicness of its setting, and so the game itself because problematic. The game never questions its praise of CEOs of corporations, its support for the police, and other ethically mucky areas in today's world. Games don't have to, but because at points this game understands the issues in its setting and other times doesn't, it ends up being disappointed. I could go on to talk about how [spoiler] the hypnosis plot feels random. Foreshadowing the villian's hypnosis through a minor NPC playing with a toy doesn't really feel like foreshadowing as it already had a more real explanation that also fit the game's humor. Honestly though, I think I got to my major gripes with the narrative. If you're just here to let yourself be silly and enjoy silly, I think you overall will have a good time. I did! :DD But I think the storytelling could be much stronger, and I want furry works that are also great character works. [/spoiler]

Charming, relatively short (6 hours) little adventure.