Murder Mystery Adventure is an older game from 2016. It's a venerable 8 years old at the time of this review. It's a poor man's ripoff of games like Myst where you've got a static scene, you can look around a bit, but there's no real locomotion, you move by clicking on doors etc which gives you a little movement cutscene, then you're looking at the next static scene, where you do basic point and click adventure stuff.
The title says it all, in terms of plot, you're in a charming manor (with low poly, shoddy assets and barely any shaders/shadows etc, it looks awful), and someone got a murder done on them, so you have to solve who done it. Which is fine if is's presented well, but it's not.
It's from EnsenaSoft, and I was really surprised to find out they're asset flippers, but they are.
EnsenaSoft have a known history of trying to scam people into paying them money for someone else's work, through this account or through closely linked/alt accounts. One example of EnsenaSoft doing this is [url=https://store.steampowered.com/app/489890]Puzzles at Mystery Manor[/url], which is really the "[url=https://unityfreaks.com/asset/1320]Abandoned Manor MegaPack v.2[/url]" asset, written by the actual developers, Man-Man. I think that might have been removed from Steam now. I guess it deserved it.
Taking this shovelware seriously as if it was a genuine attempt to make a game, it doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision.
The game assets are fairly mediocre/low quality, in some places they appear mismatched... Ultimately the quality of these assets, and thus the overall visual is lower than average, and low quality always makes for a less than optimal gaming experience. Remember, we're looking for the best of the best of 100,000+ games on Steam.
The game features lazy low-polygon "retro" assets, making this look like a barely functional 3D game from the mid 2000s. It's unclear why the developers weren't able to arrange high quality, high polygon count contemporary assets for the game, and also irrelevant... what matters is that this looks bad as a result of their decisions, a compromise PC gamers shouldn't have to put up with.
The controls can't be customised because the game has such a dumbed down, simplified interface that it's just point and click stuff like a browser/Flash game. The fact that the interface is this dumbed down might be seen as a problem in itself, however... this is a fairly shallow experience if you're the kind of gamer that likes to play games with deep, rich control schemes and interaction. You'll get none of that here.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this game was with players reveals a surprise... there's a modest spike in player counts for the game. But this only happened once, around the same time that trading cards were applied to the game... so this is just card idlers getting their cards and moving on. A closer look at the numbers shows the game just has a couple of players every week running up the game and idling it for cards, then deleting it. We must ask how it benefits gamers for there to be so many games like this, with no merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards.
So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?
Murder Mystery Adventure has the gamer gouging price of around $5 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the unethical nature of the developer. For comparison, the $5 asking price for this game could get you games like "The Witcher 2", "Dragon Age: Origins" or "X-Com 2". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this.
