Ratings and Reviews by thesleuthacademy

The game world in this piece is larger than I had expected, and its implementation is pretty seamless. I was never gladder to have found a hint forum thread, without which I probably would have given up after the first two hours of playing (since by then I was still pretty clueless as to what I should be doing and where). After looking through some of the hints, I realised I had missed out many areas and items. It became quite mentally draining to have to explore all the cardinal directions available and re-read some of the prose only to find that I had missed out on exploring several areas.

Yet I was intrigued by the mystery enough to press on. Perseverance is key to reaching any one ending: examine everything, explore every nook and cranny. And there is a difference between ASK and TELL - you might progress with one but not the other! The initial frustration gradually gave way to a sense of "okay, this is actually doable" as the momentum built up with more items and new areas being found.

Managed to reach all three endings after two days of playing. Didn't get a complete full score in any of these, but I was satisfied with having unravelled the mystery. (Spoiler - click to show)Not sure if it was possible to actually read the mayor's journal but would've loved to do so.

Overall, I enjoyed the exploration and plot, but incorporating a hint system (at minimum) might help others enjoy the game a little better.

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.