Ratings and Reviews by Sam Kabo Ashwell

The key to this is setting and aesthetics. Most of the gameplay revolves around running errands, finding a cat, meeting your friend for lunch and so on, but you're doing it through sun-dappled vineyards and grand old libraries. It's (somewhat girly) high fantasy, which isn't really my genre, but it was a very pleasant space to inhabit nonetheless.

Plot-wise, the game ends just as the action begins, which is sort of an anticlimax; it feels like the intro to a much larger game. "More please" is hardly excoriating criticism, but as it stands the grand-scale political intrigue and the closing action scene feel like a distraction from what the game's good at.

There are a few pieces of art, which are effective as far as they go; there aren't really enough of them to contribute much to the game proper, though, so it's probably best to think of them as cover art.

As with Gun Mute, the basic approach here is to take a lot of fun, highly familiar tropes, pack them in densely and then turn the saturation up a couple of notches. So, the crime-fighting protagonists are ravishingly attractive and barely avoid falling into each others' arms at any given moment; the villain is given to over-the-top monologuing; and so on. The writing is good, even if the one-word parser limits your ability to poke at the scenery.

Because the basic style being drawn on is an episodic one - a Sherlock Holmes short story, an Avengers episode - the game feels very short. Character development doesn't really get very far beyond introduction, for instance.

Not as theoretically exciting as Gun Mute -- the setting's more conventionally handled and the interaction gimmick is less striking -- but a solid and enjoyable piece of work.