Mystery of the Malign

Do you feel jaded from modern detective games with swanky animations, poor UI or puzzles that just don't make sense? Consider this your oasis in the desert. Mystery of the Malign is a thrilling ride of deduction and discovery with a story so good, even stick figures could have sold it. Despite no VA, the characters are bursting with real personality - from the evasive tour guide to the cantankerous curator - and this makes the questioning process a real treat. Combined with snooping around the museum grounds, you'll slowly collect *just* enough information to fill up your notebook and hear that satisfying, spooky sound effect whenever you solve a case. This game excels in its atmosphere. Not just audio design, but the ever-present threat of a jump-scare as you explore dim passageways, the enduring mystery of what lies beneath the secret trap door, the inexplicable buzzing coming from a security guard's locker - all testament to genuinely creepy world-building. I am eagerly awaiting for more cases in this universe.

Mystery of the Malign is not a game for everyone. It is deliberately retro, some of the inventory / evidence management is lacking some Quality of Life, there could be a lot more options for customizing controls and whatnot. But as soon as you step over the slight frustration of its presentation, you find a deep and very involved detective game, that feels like a true investigation. Filled with characters that will lie to you and try to deceive you, often not out of guilt, but simply because telling the truth is not advantageous to them. There are dozens of potential evidences and you can ask every NPC questions about all of them. It is not hard to feel lost and in awe of the size of the task ahead. The game is about taking out your magnifying glass and looking through the entire environement, for the piece of the puzzle that will allow you to place those other pieces that seem disparate at the moment. I have yet to conclude it, and might adapt my review. But at the moment, this is a fine piece of detective game, a uniquely deep and interesting one. Highly recommended.

I really enjoyed my time with this game. For what little there is, it's a surprisingly thorough and logical detective game. However it's very clearly unfinished. The ending is very abrupt and unsatisfying. This game feels like the opening chapter of a much larger experience that was abandoned. I can see why. There is an impressive commitment to the deductive reasoning in this game, that was likely exhausting to maintain for what i assume to be a very small team of devs. I would really love to see more from gameplay supremacy. Clearly a lot of talent on display here.

This is an excellent free-form detective game. It does very little to guide the player or usher them along, which will not be for everyone, but I loved the freedom to snoop and make my own connections. This also means there's tons of superfluous information and red herrings to stumble across, so you'll likely be a bit clueless some of the time, but it all comes together beautifully. The game also doesn't require you solve absolutely everything to progress the story, I certainly didn't. I would love for some of the keys to be better labelled and for the lighter to produce [i]slightly[/i] more light, currently it's just barely better than walking in complete darkness.

So much promise, but really could have used some "keep it simple stupid." Way too much text, way too many systems, way too many options... It feels like it's just stuff for stuff's sake. The whole "hey here's a massive book of paranormal slapped in your face" drained the last bit of fun out for me.

Genuinely a really cool game that scratches that mystery itch

Really makes you feel like you're a real detective slowly unraveling what happened. Going from stumbling around. completely clueless, finding random stuff which you have no idea what it means, to slowly making theories and finding evidence to what actually happened. Its really challenging though, i "completed" the game without figuring out anything on my first attempt. So multiple playthroughs are kind of necessary.

A short but highly enjoyable detective game. If you are a person who has already played Return of the Obra Dinn and other similar games like those in the Golden Idol series, then buying this game should be a no-brainer. Admittedly, Mystery of the Malign can get a bit frustrating at times since it lacks the restricted structure of either the Obra Dinn or the Golden Idol games since you havee to actually move around in a 3D world with no handholding at all. The Obra Dinn by comparison heavily restricts player movement and therefore, in my opinion at least, helps the player better understand what must be looked at in order to progress further. I would suggest holding off on this game until you have played the other games that I have mentioned since, though it is a great game seen on its own, it is not as good as the abovementioned games.

An interesting showcase of detective work taken way too literally, including all the downtimes - endless backtracking at the slowest speed possible, sniffing dusty lowres pixels, talking to anyone about anything where 90% of the dialogue leads nowhere, and studying the geography, politics, and culture of a made up world. With no clear sense of the end goal and a sluggish UI that makes navigation absolutely tedious, the fun part never started for me.

So I will break this review into two parts. First for buyers then the latter half for the dev. So buyers you can 100 percent this game in under ten hours easily depending your pace and I think the game probably warrants zero to 1 replays. This game is strong with few flaws, awesome ambience and a really unique and cool aesthetic. You truly feel like you are piecing things together slowly. The story is enticing and some of the finest world building I have seen in a minute. Sometimes though you will be wandering around or feeling frustratingly stuck but depending on your personality this could be where the fun comes in. Overall a solid 8/10 experience. Now to the developer this clearly has love put into it and is an amazing game. Couple quick things. One there were numerous typos :downstairs spelled downtairs, wiseass spelled wiseas and a few more I didn't make note of. Secondly you recommend taking physical notes, it would be much appreciated to add an ingame journal feature to write and log notes or even an in game camera to take pictures to help players work through the material themselves. Lastly before the point of no return it would be nice to warn players and create a manual save to return to for later exploration instead of a full game restart. Also manual saving that can be returned to would be nice as well. Beyond that this game definitely at stages shows the limitations of solo work but also the love and charm, for reference I absolutely hate detective games and have never liked any of them but this put me on the genre as a whole. Please keep making games this is phenomenal.