Scene Investigators Review (dyslexicbunny)
Somewhat disappointed to not recommend this but if you compared this to Painscreek, other than graphics it feels like a massive gameplay downgrade. Environments feel incredibly limited either in interaction or many doors available to areas you are not allowed to access. Which given the size and scope of Painscreek, it is really disappointing. Also really disappointing that the apartments are very similar in the first case and given that there's 9 total cases, comes off a little lazy.
It honestly feels like a lot more effort went into making the objects to fill the environment rather than focusing on the core gameplay components. Like one of the apartments has knockoffs of multiple game consoles modeled and full of art for knockoff media. But most of the places feel aggressively sterile such that you really can only interact with the intended objects that you're wanted to. There's no irrelevant receipts, texts or calls, mail you can sort through that might be red herrings or have subtle clues.
Ultimately this struggles from the problem where many of the things you're supposed to answer would have already been answered by those on scene. And now you're just some random person coming in and hoping you can piece it all together. It feels somewhat disjointed because questions like "who's dead" would be obvious for any proper investigation but then you've eliminated some of the end quiz answers. There's also the challenge of having quizzes with text answers because you then need to account for variations of answers. One solution might have been having questions like "fill in the dinner seating chart" or "what's the party arrival order" that might be something you need to resolve.
It also feels like it struggled a little bit on my laptop which while not the greatest, still is a fairly modern gaming laptop.
Get it on sale if you're curious. Maybe give the quizzes a couple tries but get the answers online if you're confused or frustrated. Sometimes there's leaps that just are frustrating. There's some interesting stories in the game but it really suffers from other gameplay problems that make it less fun.