Go to the game's main page
Review
Originally written on the intfiction forums. Minor edits were made.
You are Anna Pointed, a detective on her first case - the disappearance of a baking contest participant’s ingredients. Talk to five quirky individuals, learn their alibis, remember details of noteworthy items and scenery, confront people on their lies, and uncover the truth (and some personally embarrassing secrets)!
The system appears to be a custom one made by the author. It sort of resembles the way default Ink games look. The game doesn’t force you to memorize details, as you can scroll through previous text, all the way back to the beginning if you so desire. You’ll need it, as you’ll be quizzed on small details dating back to before you started talking to the suspects and victim, through completing sentences using available evidence from dropdown menus. The game is forgiving and will let you guess as many times as you want without penalty. Realistically, the person who hired a detective would probably tell her to get out after seeing her fumble her accusations fruitlessly for eight turns straight, but that would be tremendously unfun.
In the beginning, exposing contradictions was not too troublesome, but in the end, it starts to become a chore as the amount of past text increases. This can compound if you’re me and banged your head against one of the puzzles for quite some time before finally resorting to looking at the walkthrough. By late game I had to CTRL + F the whole text log for people’s names, pieces of evidence, etc. Additionally, the dropdown method led to some frustration in two cases where I had the right idea but didn’t pass due to having to fit my idea into a specific sentence structure and unclear evidence naming (could be alleviated by, for example, using (Spoiler - click to show)“Dorian’s costume” and “Barnaby’s uniform” instead of just “costume” and “uniform”).
Other than that, the plot made sense with fun writing and it was personally fun having my starting theory be proven half-right as I approached the final segments. Definitely take your own notes for this one.
