The hand holding is INSANE...

[Nimbo]

I haven't had my hands held this hard since being 5 and crossing the street with my dad... Until I played this game.

The game does many things right but commits the biggest sin of not allowing the player to at least struggle and think about what to do or how to uncover the next clue in the murder locations.

The whole game unfortunately plays like a telltale game when it should have been more like LA Noire.

[Clown Reemus]

It's not hand-holding - it's how the game is designed, it won't work without clear indicators of what to press and where. There is very little interactive fiction in this game, it's more of a film.

Telltale had incomparably more interactivity in their game.

[Hydroculator]

Originally posted by Clown Reemus:

It's not hand-holding - it's how the game is designed,

That's poor design.

[Clown Reemus]

Originally posted by Hydroculator:

Originally posted by Clown Reemus:

It's not hand-holding - it's how the game is designed,

That's poor design.

It's debatable, but is this a design that the developers spent a lot of time polishing and working on? No, it's very basic.

[Nimbo]

Originally posted by Clown Reemus:

It's not hand-holding - it's how the game is designed,

Terrible design decision then.

[Clown Reemus]

I can agree, but it's also incredibly hard to make a detective game that doesn't hold your hand. As Interactive Fiction, it just doesn't work well and requires way more effort than is the return. Your best bet is the Golden Idol game.

[MoreEvilSquid]

Originally posted by Hydroculator:

Originally posted by Clown Reemus:

It's not hand-holding - it's how the game is designed,

That's poor design.

Totally agree - for some reason it appears that 99% of first-person games that are not straight up FPS decide that they need to sign-post everything and/or have an annoying narrator lead the player by the nose, because otherwise apparently players are too stupid to progress.

This game already DOES have a lot of points where the player may freely interact with things - WHY the HELL isn't this extended to all the "plot critical" bits as well (as opposed to just incidental things that we can, mostly, just look at).

Sure, the game probably needs obvious interaction points for things, especially the reconstruction things - BUT there's no reason why the game needs to lead us by the hand so severely.

Although I enjoyed this game, it would have been so much better if we had to actually figure out by ourselves what tool to use where (instead of having it obviously signposted, and in some cases mentioned by our partner/the main character on top of that). Even better still, we could have also done away with the by-the-nose "instructions" list in the upper left corner, which basically dictate a strict investigative sequence to follow...

I don't get why developers of first-person games go down this "the player is a ♥♥♥♥♥♥" route - surely it's possible to make a game more of a "game" and less of a by-the-numbers click fest?

Actually I know this is possible - a good example (although not without its flaws), is Kona. Another (flawed) game would be Vampire: The Masquerade: Swansong.

And let's not forget the Tex Murhphy games - most of which are 1P but also incredibly old and clunky, however the most recent one, Tesla Effect, does a damn good job of actually feeling like a detective game (and it's also set in a dystopian future, so anyone who likes this game should check it out, and also others in Tex Murphy franchise). That's not to say they didn't have issues - Tex games tended to have "action" sequences which often didn't work that well (but they generally weren't terrible, and sometimes they made sense).

Surely devs can take some bits from these, and improve the clunky bits, instead of just removing the puzzles altogether (or as in this case, keeping the puzzles but then leading us through them to the point they may as well not even be there).

[Sigma957]

OBSERVER did the detective part really well. Seems like this game does not. Oh and the Sherlock Holmes games have a lot of detective work that doesn't hold your hand. That was for those who say it's hard to do.

[Intamin]

Observer was boring as hell to me, but all Bloober games are.

The problem with this game is that they held your hand with gameplay 100% and with story 0%. They flipped the script quite literally.

It should've been optional handholding on the gameplay, and 70% more context for the story.

They made it so that the real detective game is figuring out the story (without the "good" ending, which few get) and the game itself isn't even a game at all, just a glorified walking sim. I like walking sims so I didn't mind the handholding too much, but the story...geez. Big miss.