Marlon’s Mystery: The darkside of crime

Too much text, too little interaction

This game wouldn't be too bad if ya'll would please fix minor bugs. I tried to put an item onto the board and it won't show. Which means I can't progress with deductions. Please fix this! When it says move to board it makes the sound only.

I try to cut indie developers some slack when it comes to imperfections, so when I realized within the first five seconds that the English translation was going to be.... Rough... I didn't much mind as long as I could understand what the sentence was supposed to have been (and I could). What I was less forgiving of was running into a game-breaking bug that locks you out of progressing in the first fifteen minutes, then going to the steam forums and seeing that the most recent thread on the forums is from December 2023 and involves the poster and several other people encountering the exact same bug. In short, the game is currently in a broken, unplayable state past a certain point and given that it was last updated almost a year ago, that doesn't seem likely to change. And so I can't recommend it.

This game have some kind of bug, that it seems you can encounter at any time in the game. And there is no way to contact the developers to get help. So just dont waste your money and time on this game...

Have you ever played Detective Grimoire? The first one, before the creators found their groove. It's like that A little rudimentary, but the illustration is nice

the game is glitchy, and the plot isn't good enough for me to try to put up with it. some items in inventory can't be added to investigation board

It's not a bad game, but there are bugs. The 'send to the board' doesn't quite work often like the scissor part. I think the achievements are not working. It is also not a long game.

Pros -Nice art-style - Interesting characters and dialog - Story was engaging enough - Auto-save Cons - The whole game is static, no animations - There is no hover over icon for hot-spots, just have to click on everything - The navigation between locations and even scenes within the same location is through a kind of book which gets a bit tedious. When moving to a different location a map would have been much nicer presentation but regardless if I'm in location I should be able to click on a door (for example) to go to the next scene. - Un-skippable credits I could forgive all of the cons except there is one more issue with this game in that main mechanic of combining clues is completely broken requiring you to exit back to the main menu several times during the game. I'm actually surprised I was able to stick with the game to the end. For a game with such little game-play (mostly a visual novel) having the one interactive element broken is unforgivable.

Marlon's Mystery is a cute little adventure game/visual novel hybrid from a small dev company named "Made in Mavis." It looks to be their first game, and after having played through the full two hours or so, I can say I'm mostly happy with what is here. There are a few localization errors (where English is still in Spanish or the grammar/verbiage is slightly off), and occasionally sending items to the Deduction Board doesn't work (especially when in your office), but overall this a a cute, short detective story that is a great "Baby's First Point and Click." The puzzles aren't very hard and they mostly involve connecting items on the Deduction Board, but the story is an interesting one. What's left unsaid between a lot of these characters is very interesting as well. There is some reading between the lines regarding personal interaction, but it also means that younger gamers will have a slightly different experience than adult ones. In all, for ten dollars, this is worth picking up to support a new, small dev team. It feels like we'll be seeing more from these characters is this one is successful and I'm more than happy to check out what else Made In Mavis has planned in the future. Good luck!

There are lots of text that give the player little to no choice at all. The two main characters are not relatiable and even their dynamic together misses something, fails to be interesting. There is a serious bug very early, that forces you to uninstal and reinstall, and can still reappear, you never know when - which is going to require uninstalling again... and, the killer problem: there is no Steam Cloud support. So, everytime you will try to play this game, you will have to start from scratch, and hope/gamble your time - until the end - that the bug won't corrupt the progression. So you have to backup your saves manually and be ready to guess when it's you who are stock in mystery solving, and when the game is actually secretly bugging.