Tangle Tower

[b]This game was primarily played on Steam Deck offline, so the hours played do not reflect the time displayed. I completed this game fully before writing this review, and got most of the achievements.[/b] [hr][/hr] This is maybe the most like, 5/10 game I've ever played in this genre. It would be a 7 or even an 8, but it really disappointed me in the end. Now, there's a lot I could praise here. The art is quite nice, the characters and setting are memorable, the voice acting is great, and the titular Tangle Tower has a lot of secrets to explore and uncover within its halls. This is a point-and-click murder mystery game, which comes with all the trappings of the genre you could expect. Collect evidence and testimony from the colorful cast, solve logic puzzles, inventory puzzles, all sorts of puzzles short of jigsaw puzzles really, and present evidence to corner liars and get the truth out of them. The characters in this game are somewhat interesting because while none of them are really all that engaging in a void, they all have relationships with each other, and they're all hiding [i]something[/i] for you to squeeze out of them. The actual mystery, at least most of it, is also fairly well done. There's lots of moving parts to the murder, and lots of small pieces of the puzzle that you'll have to slot together into a full picture of the crime. I probably wouldn't really have many complaints about this game at all, but all of this is in service of a conclusion to the mystery that is deeply unsatisfying and impossible to really figure out on your own because of how random of a plot twist it is. You solve the mystery in the sense that you uncover the meat of the crime and how it happened, but you're barely given a chance to digest or think about it because the culprit then randomly reveals themselves which is already bad enough, but there's another fairly stupid plot twist on top of that too that only barely makes sense and is completely unnecessary. You would never be able to guess any part of the actual solution regarding the antagonist, and much of your time spent doing so until the very end of the game is wasted. I'm not entirely against this kind of thing - [i]Disco Elysium[/i] also has a culprit you can't reasonably uncover on your own - but that game isn't explicitly a whodunnit murder mystery and has much more going on. This game actually is a murder mystery, that's the entire point - but it sucks at it. I won't pretend that the likes of [i]Ace Attorney[/i] or similar are always smash hits - the culprits are usually pretty obvious save for the final cases - but at least an obvious culprit gives you an end point to work backwards from. In this case, you're working towards a solution that feels abrupt and awkward. Again, there's a lot to like here. The art's great, puzzles are cool, characters and voices stand out as a high point, but if you're in this for a mystery experience like I was, I don't think you'll be very happy by the end. Hopefully the newly-released sequel is better in this regard.