The Mermaid Mask

holy tuff

2.5/5 on Backloggd - https://backloggd.com/u/everin/review/5244910/ Welp, that landed as kind of a stinker for me. I finished it because I paid for it, and it wasn't obvious how much I didn't like it until the last 50% of it. I was hoping at least the conclusion might entertain me despite the faults in narrative design, but that was strongly not the case. The art and animation are astonishingly beautiful, the character writing is charming, and the general premise is a fun time...but the actual execution of a "detective game" in the last half is pretty flat. First, there's way too much adventure game "click on everything and talk to everyone about everything," but so much of it isn't compelling enough for me to feel motivated, and the last chunk had me clicking the hint button for where to go next because I just didn't care to keep walking between rooms thinking about what might arbitrarily be the next step in the scripted logic of certain things. The last section is the worst part of this, with the logic motivating what allows you to find the last few clues feeling flimsy at best, particularly when the interface makes it really seem like you're holding and presenting objects to people when that's literally not the case and just raises questions as to how people know so much about the objects you're talking about when they can't possibly see them in all three dimensions in their own bedrooms because many couldn't be moved. Nitpicky? Yes, but it stands out when so many steps of the story are just "a person said touch this, and so I touched it, and now the story can continue." Next, there are way too many "deduction" conversations where what's being deduced is dramatically uninteresting, moments where it feels more like I'm playing Blue's Clues than an actual mystery game, and a great deal of the deduction design feels like it was put there because it had to be due to a template and not because the writers had a good idea for it actually to be compelling. Half of the suspects don't even have a good reason to be hiding what you discover about them in the context of a murder having taken place, and it's just incredibly low-stakes stuff. The Séance of Blake Manor came out last year and does the same thing with "one macro mystery and many things to deduce about a cast of suspects and their own problems." Obviously, that's MUCH higher scope, but it's also just better mystery, clue, and deduction design. The ultimate drop for me, though, is that the end of the mystery simply isn't very good. I won't write direct spoilers about it here, but the writing across the board barely has themes or depth. Some of the most critical clues are glaringly obvious while requiring you to repeatedly go through conversations about them or click on pieces of evidence that the characters themselves have literally already described in great detail, and the revelations at the end both made me feel nothing and, in some ways, didn't even make sense in terms of dramatic stakes. Like, the fundamental character conflict that led to the murder mystery just makes me think...this is nothing, and there was no good reason for this conflict to happen. All the best art and character charm in the world can't fix this for me, but it clearly does a lot for other people. It's not exactly bad, but I was certainly disappointed by the end.