Just saying, but I do have a curator page. If like my remarks about games, you can find more of them here: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/44130985-TDP%27s-Gaming-Escapades

Note: The following review doesn't feature any spoilers whatsoever.

Never in my life I have been this torn on whether to recommend or not recommend a game, just to finally let my bias decide and make the good stuff weight more than the bad. Chicken Police is a visual novel with heavy emphasis on conversations, and one that has an unexpected amount of quality put into its world building, aesthetics, music and characters. It does them so well that I am looking forward to the sequel and how it's going to improve. But unfortunately, the storytelling and story progression are where the game is lacking in.

The very first thing that someone notices after taking a glance at the game's images is surely the character design. Chicken Police is another piece of media that goes for an all-animal setting, but the way it represents the characters is wildly different. The characters in this game are all just real animal heads attached to digitized human bodies in a seamless manner, and aside from the second chapter when you see some truly weird and uncanny imagery, the overall character design looks acceptable and well-done.
And it's not just the looks of the characters that is well-done. Every character not only has a distinct look, but also a distinct personality. Nearly each of the characters have a believeable personality of their own, with their voice actors managing to relay those personalities through the way they talk. Chicken Police has a stellar cast of professional voice actors that have done their job incredibly well, with the main character, Sonny Featherland, being the highlight of the bunch. How stellar you ask? Well... one of the voice actors has also voiced the oldest living witcher in a game called The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Got your attention now, huh?

If there's one thing that Chicken Police absolutely nails, it's the presentation; both in terms of how it looks and how it sounds. All of the environments are well-detailed and in tone with the atmosphere and noir theme of the game. And the jazzy music that accompanies you in each of the locations is superbly composed. You bet "My City Is On Fire" and "Have You Been With A Predator Before" are now on my music playlist.
But... well... while all of these aspects of the game have ended up looking incredible, there is one aspect that its quality really isn't up to par with the rest, and that's the story.

Believe it or not, Chicken Police's biggest problem is ultimately the story and its progression.
Make no mistake, the game starts really well in terms of the story and even has some positive points. There's a whole bunch of lore prepared for the world that the game's events happen in, the writers have included witty references to classic stories such as the tortoise and the hare, some of the jokes actually managed to get a chuckle out of me, the banter between the main characters is enjoyable as a whole and the mystery surrounding the plot seems compelling at first. But when it comes to the game moving forward with the plot, it really cannot keep the same amount of quality throughout it.
The story starts with an interesting premise that can go anywhere in terms of how it can end. But the game ends with a completely predictable and rather unsatisfying ending. By the time you find out about the story's "twist", you can immediately put the piceces together and find out how it's going to end. The reveal and the ending are so cliché and disappointing that not only all of the mystery established in the first chapter comes crashing down, but they also raise questions about various events throughout the game with no way to answer them.
Then there's the issue of dialogue fatigue kicking in after a few hours. As established before, Chicken Police is a narrative-driven visual novel with a huge number of conversations. A normal playthrough of the game takes about 6.5 hours on average, and a completionist playthrough (which involves talking to everyone and interacting with every item multiple times at various points in the game) takes about 9.5 hours. That basically means you are dealing with nearly 6-10 hours of almost non-stop dialogue. And unfortunately, the game doesn't offer much to keep the fatigue from kicking in.

Chicken Police is a noir, detective themed game. It doesn't have the freedom of other visual novels in terms of events it can use to break the staleness. So basically, all it can offer are minigames and puzzles, and there's not much of them. In terms of minigames, you only encounter 4 of them in the whole game, with each chapter's epilogue containing a simple "connect the dots" type of minigame just to summarize your findings. As for the puzzles, you only encounter two. This means most of your time will be spent watching conversations, some of them feeling unnecessary.
In the story, the main characters go through various situations and sometimes, the tone of the conversations either doesn't fit the situation or they feel completely worthless; especially when it comes to optional locations you can visit. At first, these optional locations seem to add interesting tidbits. But as you progress further, you'll notice some of them (like Mullen's Newsstand) feel incredibly redundant; So much so that you could remove them from the game and nothing would change.
The game also does something that can really sour the experience: Not telling you whether or not doing a specific action is required for progression. There are multiple sections in the game, one of them being the ending, where doing a specific action is needed to unlock the ability to progress but the game neither tells nor hints you about it. On the other hand, there are two specific sections in chapters 1 and 4 where doing a specific action immediately kicks you out of the scene you were in. For one of them (chapter 1) the game allows you to go back to the scene later on, but the other has no warnings attached to it and you can never go back to it. This especially becomes a problem when you realise the scenes you cannot return to, are actually the ones that host some of the collectibles.

The next problem with the gameplay presents itself in the form of questioning sections, where you have to basically interrogate a person for information.
The questioning phase in Chicken Police is incredibly weird. You are supposed to take the main characters's personal remarks about a character into account and study the personality traits of the character in front of you, and then choose one of the questions that appear on the screen to get information out of them. The game then rates your performance at the end of questioning, telling you how many questions you asked and how well you did. However, the questioning process makes little sense.
It seems like every question that feels like the right choice to the player is actually wrong. There are numerous instances in the questioning parts where you might choose a question that you think will work well, but instead it does the opposite, forcing you towards trial and error. This was a HUGE issue back when the game launched, as the game didn't offer you any chance to retry the questionings. Nowadays, and with the introduction of a retry button, it's not as bad as before. But still, this doesn't really fix the issue.


Its unique art style, great soundtrack, likable characters and superb voice acting make it incredibly charming. But story progression & the clichéd ending make it really tough to recommend to everyone.

It's a slow burn, but the writing is solid, and there is definitely a charm to animal characters with human bodies, and seeing through the eyes of a depressed cop who can only see in black and white. It's certainly worth a look. A hard to forget story about the city of clawville, where prey, predator, insect etc. all live together in a not-perfect way that is compelling to visit, full of expected but still funny references to animal racism - quit horsing around.

I really liked this game. The story is only decent but everything else is superb. The voice acting, the music, the theme and my god it's aesthetically clucking perfect. I highly recommend getting this and kill 7-8 hours. I might wait for a sale though if you prefer to get at least an hour for every $ spent.