What Happened to the Crew?

This game makes me desperately wish IFDB allowed half-stars in their ratings, because What Happened to the Crew? is my textbook definition of a three-and-a-half star game. I'm about to say some things that sound quite harsh, but I want to make it clear that I did, in fact, enjoy my time with What Happened, and if you've played and enjoyed Type Help by William Rous and the author's other game The Red Pearls of Borneo, you should give it a try. Just...temper your expectations a smidge.

Now that we've established that I do, in fact, like this game, let's get to the mean stuff.

It feels unkind to profile a developer with only two games under their belt like this, but I can't help but notice that Bushmonkey seems to have a habit of front-loading all their interesting puzzles, then slamming on the brakes for the last act. Red Pearls becomes almost completely linear for the last half of the story, which is boring but at least easy. What Happened, meanwhile, wraps up by making the player do five rounds of Wordle in a row. No, I'm not joking, and I'm not marking that as a spoiler because, if you do decide to give this game a shot, you should look up a walkthrough for at least that part. After that, if you want to unlock every document, the game all but requires repetitive guess-and-checks in every room; that part didn't bother me all that much, but if you're blanketly opposed to search-scumming, it's probably best just to quit without 100% completion.

One of its saving graces, in my opinion, is that the writing of What Happened is quite good. The characters are rather bog-standard archetypes, but that's all they really need to be. (Spoiler - click to show)The premise reminded me a lot of Doom, in a very nostalgic way; combining alien and demonic forces is, I think, a lot more interesting than either on their own. The over-arching plot is far from mind-blowing, but it was engaging enough to keep me going to the end, which must be worth something.

All in all, while I have my fair share of gripes with What Happened to the Crew?...I'll always be a sucker for the "who was here when" microgenre. Type Help and Red Pearls might be better, but, well, a less-good cake is still a cake.