Samuel Sage: The Mystery at Penby Inn

Short detective game. Great to play on your free day with a nice cup of coffee - simple controls and linear progression style means you can sit back and enjoy the story, which is solid and believable. It didn't feel rushed, but rather well thought out, especially when the player is given a deeper dive into cyber security. The crime solved logically with the clues found during the investigations, and our protagonist's personal life had something of a bittersweet twist at the end. The characters cycled through a limited set of emotions during conversations. While there could have been more, it didn't really bother me when playing, but was something that came to mind as an afterthought. Music was fine, and the art style was clean and easy to look at. This game was overall a positive experience.

A marginal thumbs-up, mostly because I've played far worse visual novels. As long as you go into this VN knowing that it's short and linear, with no actual mystery-solving on your part, it's an entertaining trifle. I appreciated the bits of animation on the characters as they changed expressions. The presentation could've used more polish, with variety in where characters entered, exited, and stood, and in how scenes transitioned. I was not entirely fond of the music choices, but that kind of thing is entirely subjective. I found the world worth inhabiting for the two hours of this little story, though it was not compelling enough for me to truly care about the characters, who are all loosely sketched. The writing itself was largely average, with its share of word-usage issues and not-quite-tight grammar. Sometimes the investigation screens repeated information between the description of the evidence up top and Samuel's thoughts about it down below. When I come across a mystery game, I tend to expect a lot from it. If you tell me that a game has investigation, I want to be able to do that. Simply clicking everything there is to be clicked--whether they're evidence hot spots or a list of places to go or people to talk to--isn't really investigating. So this game does fall short in that regard. But ultimately I don't begrudge it for that. I knew it would be a lighter read and a brief experience, and it delivered at that level.