izigame.me

I feel horrible not recommending this because I was so excited for this game AND I loved EQ Studios other game, The Painscreek Killings, but I feel this game isn't at a level where it was ready for release, and not for $25 when not on sale (compared to The Painscreek Killings, which I do think is worth its price).
-The game has a lot of bugs still, to the point a wallet I was looking at got stuck to my screen entirely.
-The cases almost always require leaps of logic (which can be done well in mystery games) without providing enough information for the player to actually make it to that answer. I understand it's recreating crime scenes and IRL crime scenes seldom have all the information you need to figure out what happened, but this is not real life, it's a game, and the players need more information. This was a problem with the demo, too, and unfortunately, that demo case remains in the game but with even LESS information than in the demo, yet the answers remain the same. One of the cases even asks for an answer that you CAN'T reasonably guess without continuing to the next mission and then backtracking. It's bad case design and isn't fun to figure out what happened.
-The environments use the same graphics and method of interacting that The Painscreek Killings has, but it is much less interactive. I miss being able to open every drawer ever to check for that last piece of evidence to help connect the dots. Now almost nothing is interactable, and it makes the environments feel clearly staged.
-The questions you have to answer to "solve" the cases are horrible. Why does it matter who sat in chair #3? It has no relevance to the crime that took place. Why not ask who the killer was? What was their motive? Nope, instead just answer how many times this guy beat women during this time period- not that it mattered for the case at ALL.
-Answering the questions is annoying, too. Unlike in The Painscreek Killings where you got to choose from drop-down menus, you have to type out the answer to everything yourself. Will the game get my answer with their first name only? First and last? First, middle, AND last? Better hope you don't make a typo! It's a bad system that makes answering already lame questions feel even worse.
-There are loads of typos and grammatical errors, which is a minor issue overall, but still something to acknowledge. The preliminary case has a newspaper article that has 4 egregious errors within 2 sentences. The articles themselves are goofy because it feels like they were written by people who have never read a newspaper- writers can NOT and do not write articles the way the game does. There's an article unrelated to the case that even tries to shame a victim and imply that the killer isn't entirely at fault for their choice to kill an innocent person because actually... their mother wasn't that present so it's kinda also her fault her kid decided to kill someone. ????? A real writer for a paper would NEVER be able to get that through.
-The game at no point explains what happens or what the details are surrounding each case, which is a major bummer. Because with how unrelated a lot of the questions are to pass each mission, it is very possible to miss important information regarding the actual crime, especially with how much the game wants you to make wacky guesses to try connecting information when it would make more sense to just... add another piece of information to help facilitate the connection. I personally was able to figure out a lot of the background of the 'Missing' missions, and I think it had a pretty good background and setup, but there were still a ton of unanswered questions, and it would have been nice to get a story afterward that explains the character's setups, how each piece of evidence was relevant, what happened before/during/after the crimes, what the motives were, etc.
-The sound is all over the place like the music and sound effects are obnoxiously loud upon opening the game, but turning them down even a bit makes them extremely quiet? I could never find a good balance.
-One of my only criticisms of The Painscreek Killings was the button configurations, and they're a problem here, too. They're just not very intuitive and take a lot of getting used to, and even after a few hours, it's easy to get confused and make mistakes. Thankfully you can change the mappings yourself, but I just feel like they should be better from the start.
-For as many missions as there are, I still feel like the game was kinda short? Like a few of the missions were dead easy, were you could solve them in maybe 15-20 minutes, but others were so confusing and lacking helpful evidence and information that they could easily take 1-2 hours. A mission taking 1-2 hours would be fine if it was complicated and had lots of GOOD evidence and if the questions you were asked at the end were relevant to the important part of the case, but having a case be long and complicated despite having nothing of value to it is just wasting players time. I'd much rather have 3-4 shorter but well-developed cases than one long and frustrating one. But the short cases here weren't well developed, either, so... where does that leave us?
I love the graphics (I think they're a good fit for the content at hand), I love the ambient sounds, the music is good, and there were a few times when I was excited looking through every small piece of evidence and was genuinely absorbed in solving the mystery of some missions, but the cons were so major and frequent that I wasn't enjoying the game more often than not. And that sucks. A lot. Because I was really looking forward to this game, and I saw how EQ Studios were able to make a fantastic story brought together by lots of little bits of evidence that also painted clear pictures about the characters personalities, motives, and how they interacted with those around them, so it feels extra heartbreaking to play this and see almost none of what I saw before. I REALLY wish I could recommend this, I really wish it was as entertaining and well done of a game as the premise makes it seem, but it isn't.
"...observe closely for pieces of evidence..." means just look at a glance, because almost nothing is hidden away. "...analyze possible motives" means just guess cause it will seldom be clear. "...uncover what truly happened..." also means just guess because whether you were right or wrong it doesn't matter, the questions won't be relevant to what happened and we're not even gonna THINK about telling you afterward anyway, so your guess is as good as mine.
but if you get it on a really good sale, it might be worth a bit of messing around with some friends to solve a case or two, but not much more than that.