Joe Blackhurst

Really excellent sci-fi worldbuilding and concept. In many ways it feels like a more fleshed-out Bladerunner universe. The gameplay of solving crime scenes is enjoyable although a bit tedious. There are also a little too many chapters of just story/conversations that get a bit dull. The visuals are absolutely top tier as well. The biggest drawback, unfortunately, is that there’s too many balls in the air with the narrative. Too many ancillary characters connected to the crime that you don’t know enough about to keep them all straight in your mind and it boils down to a big boring stew of “look literally every person in power is corrupt and evil ooo.” Imagine the world and characters of Bioshock but you have to learn, retain, and unravel everything in just a few hours. This and the protagonist’s layered, unexplained, frequently alluded to, backstory lead to frequent confusion where I felt like I was still trying to piece together the plot point that just happened while another is unfolding in front of me so that I’m now behind the eight ball on that one as well. It could have done a better job providing a little more context to some of the society’s aspects so that when your protagonist interacts with them you know what the heck is going on. It’s clear the intention is multiple play throughs where you make different decisions and see other sides of the story, however the gameplay is too slow to make you want to dive into another play through. The best example of the confusion is an awful “puzzle” where you use the evidence you gathered at the crime scenes to connect the dots, but in practice it’s just trial and error until you make the right connection between the evidence since the “correct” answers are rarely air tight conclusions and instead are highly subjective but must have apparently made sense to the writers. A lot of the story feels like the writers, knowing the full picture themselves, lost sight of the experience of the player who does not have all the information and didn’t realize how sloppy of a murder mystery they wrote. Maybe the worst example is you eventually encounter a menacing man who talks to you over the phone who you (a detective) IMMEDIATELY begin referring to as the killer based on ZERO evidence and yet the voice confirms they’re the killer shortly after. It’s almost like scenes were cut that bridge that massive gap in logic. But perhaps I missed something and my confusion stemmed from having to play the game over a few days because I could really only handle hour-long sessions before getting too bored. Also, the cliche of the troubled, alcoholic protagonist plagued by visions of his dead wife is a video game story element that is so rote and unoriginal at this point and the game does not give it any sort of fresh spin. There’s also a couple real bad deus ex machina plot points. Oh nice, the blimp bar you need to get to that never lands conveniently crashes into your apartment during the conversation you’re introduced to it even being a thing… In my opinion, these plot choices can be forgiven in gameplay-focused games, but not in narrative-focused games. Moments like these take me out of the story and into wanting to look up the game’s writer to judge them for their laziness. Still, I recommend this narrative game with a phenomenal setting. Just expect constant confusion and don’t expect a lot of action or fast-paced gameplay.