Mark & Lara: Partners In Justice

Nice and short little coop crime puzzler, with about 2h of playtime, totally worth its money. Really looking forward to a second case.

This game was gifted to me by a friend as they didn't realize you needed two players before they purchased it originally. Look...Mark & Lara: Partner in Justice has great artwork and the story is decently written, it's pretty easy to tell the writers aren't from New York with names/locations and other word choices that wouldn't be common in the US. But the gameplay is terrible, the "Zing" search engine portion is maddeningly idiotic, and the one time the artwork is awful with that MS Paint Zing logo. Plus buggy to all boot. At certain points I could no longer click links, had to go out attempt to interrogate, and then start the search from scratch as the drop down of things I had correct was gone. Without spoiling the specific things you need to look up in the first puzzle...just...no it's awful. Thennnn you play the most tedious game of "What one thing in several pages of dialog doesn't add up?" there is maybe one of these that actually made sense to suspect as odd/out of the ordinary. I like detective/deduction games. Played a lot of Detective a Modern Crime Board Game and Chronicles of Crime and while those can be a bit frustrating and challenging, this is just...awful. There's a lot of potential...but a good game this is not.

jogos co-op são jogos co-op. é muito difícil de você jogar um jogo com um amigo e não ser divertido, mesmo que seja por motivos que não foram objetivados pelos desenvolvedores (entregar uma experiência de qualidade, eu imagino) então tipo, apesar de ter sido divertido, não foi porque o jogo é bom, ele é cheio de problemas, e mesmo eu tendo gostado de um personagem em específico e da história um pouco, pelo preço acho que não vale a pena não... sim são só 10 reais, eu sei, mas com 10 reais tu vai lá no Pingo de Ouro com o seu amigo, compra um pastel de Frango e Catupiry cada, e ainda sobra sabe... só sei que de graça talvez eu recomendaria o jogo, o que é muito duro de falar, porque respeito muito os indie devs, mas esse jogo chegou a ser cômico de tão esquisito enfim, se você tiver 10 reais pra rasgar vai em frente eu acho, mas infelizmente não consigo "recomendar" esse daqui...

What a cool concept. Unfortunately, I think that technical limitations hold this back significantly. It relies a lot on searching the in-game computer system for hints, which is a really cool concept until you realize that if you search a slightly different term, it will give you nothing, and some search terms are quite specific. I feel terrible leaving a negative review, because the developers for this game are incredible and quite involved with the community, but the gameplay is really lackluster for how cool of a co-op game concept this is. My advice for a sequel would be to literally have a database of a bunch of random info and actual clues that you can search for like a REAL BROWSER, otherwise it's almost impossible to find anything without hints.

This game is, in a word, bad. The English translation is awkward and stiff, and while I can't necessarily fault Italian devs for it, in a genre that involves a lot of examination of words, it's not really helping. And this game is ENTIRELY words. I regularly play visual novels, that is not the issue. the issue is reading and rereading the entire script of the game to figure out the 2 specific lines (that are sometimes pages and pages apart) that contradict. The "internet searches" are comical in how little they bring up because "figuring out what specific phrase to search" is something you're supposed to do, and if you get any information early you will figure everything out even faster than you normally can. If you get ahold of a search term from later in the game, you can straight up jump to the ending which feels like and oversight (but admittedly would be fun for attempting a speedrun). There's better murder mystery visual novels (that you can get for the price of this for you and your friend). There's better asymmetrical co-op games. Admittedly I don't know of any that combine those two things specifically, but there's plenty of mild overlap. I promise, whatever itch you need to scratch, there are better solutions than Mark and Lara: Partners in Justice.

I enjoyed this very much, but it was too short. I was hoping for more cases. Hopefully there will be more in the future. But overall, really enjoyed the uniqueness of the game. Thank you

Super fun! Just charmed by the whole thing! Only got confused one time but it was easy to figure out what my mistake was after realizing they give you subtle hints when presenting contradictions. I played it on discord with a total babe too so that helped.

Cool concept for a co-op game, was a nice couple hours of puzzles that involved communicating, but we found the googling portion of the game pretty annoying. I wish that part was reworked to maybe not involve actually typing stuff. Perhaps a wordbank of relevant or highlighted phrases to choose from? Or just taking it out entirely for the sequel.

Um bom jogo pra jogar com amigos/namorado(a), simples mas muito divertido.