Noir Syndrome

The game is short and fun but it takes you a few rounds to get your bearings in the game. Rather than being a full detective game it's more like a game of "Guess Who". Except you don't have all the player cards to start guessing who it could be. It took me a few rounds before i got the hang of things. If you only have 10-15mins to spare then this is a great game to play. The dev has spoken about how they will add to the game. Will be interested in how they will change it up. I'll be revisiting the game in the future. I did buy the game on sale for less than £2 so if you have reservations on buying it full price then wait for the next sale.

💋

Pretty fun game.

Very nice game

Great idea but unfortunately it doesn't quite make it. The detecting never really makes sense and it's all just luck.

This is a 2D retro pixel point and click style 2D adventure puzzle game with a vague "noir" detective theme. The game was written in Java, which should give you a pretty clear idea of what we're dealing with here. This is game that's making a ripoff of great adventure classics as Sierre's Police Quest, Kings Quest and Space Quest games, as well as LucasArts Monkey Island and Indiana Jones games... but released around 2 decades later, with worse graphics and worse gameplay. It goes without saying, if your game design architecture goals are "Make a game worse than games from 20 years ago", you should immediately shut your PC down, disassemble it carefully and put it back in the box, and put the box out on the street in the hopes a car will run over it.

I had fun with this game for the first few playthroughts, when I had just picked it up and I didn't really know what I was supposed to be doing. I recognized that I was trying to deduce who the killer was, but the game didn't say anything about who the clues applied to. (That is, where they all evidence the killer left behind? Were there red herrings? Were some of them left by investigators? Were some of them from the victims?) Once it was clear that [spoiler]every clue is something left by the killer[/spoiler], the game became a (very) straightforward deductive reasoning game -- [spoiler]you simply amass your list of suspects, and each time you get a clue, you rule out the suspects that the clue can't apply to.[/spoiler] Then you repeat this until you've either identified the killer uniquely, or you're willing to make a guess. After that point, it was fun to play every now and then, for a little while. Steam says I've played it for three hours, and that's probably about as much time as I'll spend with the game. I have other, more involved deductive reasoning games to play. (Sherlock Zen, and a variety of picross games.) If you're gonna buy it, but it cheap.

Tags: Sidescroll - Survival & Questing Additional Tags: Delete Local Content & Remove from Library TLDR: Backtracking oriented hotspot exploration with a lot of procedural dead ends. MSpaint noir universe is a bit limited. Cardboard cutout depth. Procedurally generated sidescroll point&click dialogue content that leads you down to identify one suspect which you gun down. Keep fed and try to beat the clock as civilizans die every day. Turn based. Board-game like. 14 days, visit locations until you run out of days. Interact with npcs and objects to grind clues and cash. Try to cross reference clues to narrow them down. Once you narrow it down, find the person on the clue that you believe is the killer (somehow), and use the gun button, presumably winning the game. You get a hunger bar which is a annoying. All suspects, clues, and most interactions feel identical every time, just with randomly generated names. Locations are okay, setting is okay, and interface is okay once you warm up to it. Main issue I have is the procedural generation is not very engaging and it just feels a little bit aimless and artificial. The limited audiovisual appeal does not help matters much either. Conclusion: Altogether this is sort of a more expanded, exploration oriented version of something like Hidden in Plain Sight. I like the concept and it is somewhat engaging. It does a good job at showcasing that but too many layers of polish are missing to make the title really worthwhile to hold on to or sink time in.

Despite what many people say, Noir Syndrome isn't really bad. I can see where their complaints are coming from, and they're right that this game isn't extraordinary and has some flaws, but I think it's pretty obvious that it isn't a high-end indie masterpiece (it isn't crap either). Noir Syndrome is a game that is best enjoyed in small doses, basically because the mechanics are so simple that every time you play you'll do the same more or less, this doesn't mean each playthrough is the same though, you could get murdered by a hitman before you arrest the suspect, you could run out of time before encountering the definitive clue that confirms your suspicions..., on top of that, the game has various difficulty levels that can mean less clues, harder to spot murderers, frequent hitmen... The tutorial is not very useful but, like I already said, the game is so simple that that really isn't a flaw. The story of Noir Syndrome is that you are a private investigator which mission is to solve a murder, in order to do that you'll have to travel to different locations across your city to gather clues and find suspects, you'll talk to npcs that may tell you who might have commited the crime or where you could go to find clues, those clues give you information about the murderer, which eventually help you pinpoint the culprit, and they are hidden within different objects scattered among different locations, you could find some sunglasses on a seat at the diner, or maybe a jacket on a matress at some rat-riddled apartment. The game (like I think seems obvious) doesn't give you a great amount of options, it doesn't have nearly unbelievable plot-twists or some bizarre murder mysteries, it's not L.A. Noire, it doesn't have refined and detail-filled cases waiting for you to solve them, it's more like an arcade-y, fast Cluedo that is good to keep you entertained every now and then with some nice noir taste to it. I think this is exactly the "problem" with this game for some people, many of those who gave this a bad review expected it to be far more sophisticated than it really is. There's also an aspect of the game that I think many people are neglecting in their reviews: the music. The ambient music is fantastic, 100% noir, so I'd say that is a point in the game's favour as well. What else can I say? I liked it. It goes to show that Steam ratings aren't always right.

Good game had a lot of fun with this on my awful notebook back in school