I was excited to see that this game was translated to English, but I wound up being very disappointed. The localization is good (there are some slightly awkward passages, but that's all), but the puzzles themselves were not very good. I only completed the first case, because several aspects of that case left a bad taste in my mouth. It is impossible to explain what those are without spoiling the solutions, so be careful if you choose to read on.

One of several twists in the first case is that the culprit's power, which was assumed to be telekinesis, is actually the creation of invisible objects. The setup for this twist is that each suspect has a file that states the name of their power and certain details about how it works. The culprit's file describes her power as "intangible object manipulation," and the protagonist discusses, at the beginning of the case, the fact that this is a strange way of saying "telekinesis." Then when it is revealed that the culprit's power is not telekinesis, there is a discussion of how her true ability is technically consistent with what's written in her file. But it isn't! The objects she creates are not intangible. They are invisible. They are VERY tangible. One of them was the murder weapon! So you are meant to think "what a clever misdirection" but instead you just feel that the game lied to you.

A second example: the objects that the culprit can create are always cubic and they have a maximum volume of 2 cubic meters. Part of the solution to the mystery depends on the idea that these objects can be up to 2 meters tall. But they can't! A cube with volume 2m has sides of 1.26m. When you're solving the mystery, it's obvious what the game WANTS you to answer (the puzzles are mostly very easy) but it's also obvious that this answer should be wrong.

The game is too simplistic with its characters, story, and morals. There's a lot of cliches which you expect to be subverted in some way, but they never are. It seems like every supporting character was made stupider to prop the main one as a some kind of genius. Even though he analyzes situation like any average real life person would.

Matching and finding clues is never fun, because they're either way too obvious or way too obscured. You just follow the author's trail of thought and sometimes their leaps in logic or approach to a situation is unnatural and artificial. For such a simple UI it still feels clunky and a bit unintuitive.

The best part of the game is art and some worldbuilding about the inner workings of a society where staffers exist.

The Overwhelmingly Positive rating is misleading, it's just an alright game

I seem to be out of step here, because this game has so many positive reviews, but I was underwhelmed. I tried, honestly, 5 hours, but just gave up in exasperation. The dialogue mechanism seemed interminable, the clue selection was clunky, and the clues were either so simple that you felt they were wrong, or completely opaque. Now I'm looking at Staffer Reborn, that I got with the package, thinking, should I? But honestly, I'm not even going to try.....

This one was... difficult for me to review. There's so much about it that I like, but at the same time there's a lot that I really don't like about this game.

Don't get me wrong; I don't HATE StafferCase. I actually really like a lot of what the game has to offer. The art, UI and music are utterly gorgeous. I adore the character designs here - my favorite has to be that of our supervisor, Pandoria Redfins. Additionally, a lot of the concepts of this game's worldbuilding are intriguing to me, and I wish that the developers had spent more time on that instead of the surface-level themes that we have now. I would give examples, but the biggest failings are in Case 4 out of 5, and all rely on very heavy spoilers.

The problem with StafferCase, in my opinion, is that it teases all sorts of concepts that could be really cool to explore in this world, only to pull it away last-second and tell you "sorry, this is what you get." This also applies to the actual cases that are the bread-and-butter of the game, too. I'm pretty sure that literally all five cases take place within the span of an in-game hour, maybe 3-4 hours at its longest. There's never any time to breathe, reflect on what's happening, or to dig deeper and get more information. Most of cases are just "get in, talk to people, poke around a bit, yell at someone for lying to you, figure out who's the murderer, and get a little extra something at the very end that makes you wish more time had been spent digesting this info."

One thing that sets me off as a nitpick is the translation, as well. Call it what you will, but a lot of the English translation just feels off from a reader's standpoint. It's not like I was left scratching my head or trying to decipher what was being said - I was able to understand the meaning behind a line perfectly fine - but there was many a time when I'd reread a line, frown and think to myself "no one talks like that." I'm not one of those people who says that localizers are evil and should be replaced by machine-translation; far from it, actually. I only wish that a little more time had been spent tweaking up lines or consulting some more people to make dialogue flow more naturally.

I don't know, maybe I'm just a picky reader. I got absolutely FURIOUS at the true ending of Case 4 because of the messed up moralities, and no one else I talked to about it seemed to be half as upset (oh yeah, each case has an alternate ending or two that you'll have to actively hunt down yourself if you want all the achievements, because the game does NOT give you any hints for these endings).

Overall, I think I can sum up my thoughts as "god, I wish these cases were longer." I'm going to be there Day 1 for the sequel, Staffer Staff, but there's a lot that Team Tetrapod can improve on between now and that sequel. I can't wholly recommend Staffer Case without 15 different strings attached, but I don't loathe the game or think the devs should've never made it.

I actually would love if this game were just a solid Ace Attorney knockoff on another theme, but there's too many pieces that just don't work well enough for even an inexpensive version of this. The dialogue is flat, the characters aren't compelling. And the mysteries are just... the whole first case, there wasn't a single moment that really made me feel clever for working it out, right? No big satisfying "aha" when everything came together. I think fundamentally what a game like this needs is either a really, really clever, tight set of puzzles to solve--or a big emotional hook in every case *before* you set about solving it. This has neither.

I almost never drop mystery games, but I'm leaving this one midway into the second case because I just can't imagine wanting to sit through a bunch more cases like this. The writing may be better in the original language, but in English this is a skip.

Unfortuanately not as great detective game as reviews points it out

Why do mystery games almost always have logic errors? It's so weird. Anyways, this is yet another one with problems. Errors in the tutorial and errors in Case 1 and I didn't bother to go any further. Phoenix Wright also has illogical cases, but it makes up for it with entertaining writing. This game does not.

Play the demo before you go for this one.
I really tried but couldn't make it through the first "case".
The interface is ok but very basic. The writing is horrible, it's like a 4-year old writing his first sentences in english. Only a 4 year old wouldn't write "joke" after "joke" aimed at giggling baby's. It's not atrocious, it's not mindnumbingly boring or stupid, it's so horrible it's effectively inducing violence for all the pain it causes when I tried to keep calm and read the godforsaken dross.

worst game ver
dont buy
dark souls of visual novels to hard boring and stupid
awful trash