Ratings and Reviews by thesleuthacademy

The narrative and mechanics were engaging enough to draw me in after the first few minutes. There are multiple endings. I only realised that the red cards were meant to be "solved" after completing about 60-70% of the game. Ended up "restarting the day" some ten times and managed to solve 5 out of the 6 cards, with still a 71-74% completion rate which was admittedly frustrating. (Spoiler - click to show)I am not sure if the Basement is supposed to be a location card (which would make it the 13th of 15 locations)...? I felt that technically it should be the case, but it appears at the top half rather than in the Locations section.

The implementation bugs ruined a huge part of the experience for me - it is annoying when you had played through to 70% only for the text to be truncated, the links to not display properly, or (Spoiler - click to show)after Felisa wakes up and gets a stroke of sorts, her character card disappears and it's not possible to continue - I was forced to restart the game several times because of these glitches since it did not have a save and load feature.

Overall, I really enjoyed investigating the mystery but towards the end I had no choice but to give up because the bugs appear to make it impossible to complete.

I dismissed Missive (hehe) after my first playthrough a few months ago as I couldn't make sense of it. For some reason I came across this again recently and decided to give it another chance.

I was clueless about what the three choices for each letter meant on the first few playthroughs despite using the hints provided. My biggest takeaway from this game was that replaying through the various choices became part of the experience in the unravelling of the central mystery that is (Spoiler - click to show)what happened to Mr Astor. While I had some help decoding the cipher, I did not manage to figure out the crossword puzzle towards the end.

Contrary to what some reviews have mentioned, you need to get all six puzzles correct to solve the key mystery. (Spoiler - click to show)If you solved all six puzzles correctly, an additional choice will appear at the end - I felt this made it quite unfair to players, since, if they did not get the 6/6 score, the key mystery remains unsolvable for them.

It was still an enjoyable mystery nevertheless. All in all, while the game mechanics make for an interesting way to investigate a mystery, it would be great if it were "cleaner" (less vulgarities and vices) and if the puzzles were slightly easier (I had to dig up earlier reviews for clues for many of these, though it was a fun investigative venture in itself).