This would be a decent short point and click adventure title were it not so… slapdash. The English translation is pretty engrish, though the voice acting isn't that bad. Some locations have two music tracks accidentally playing on top of another and the game characters have entirely different design and looks during in-game and cutscenes. (The protagonist alternates between having a black three-day stubble and a shaved face with silver moustache – and gains about 20 years of age!)

Puzzles can be roughly divided into two categories – there's item-using puzzles that fit the world, and random bouts of sudoku and tic-tac-toe that seem there just for filler. And I had the tic-tac-toe glitch on me. It's just so half-hearted and I'm willing to give historical adventure titles quite a bit of leeway.

I suppose the best thing about this game is that the journal in the inventory works as a walkthrough if you get stuck.

(Oh yeah, I left the game on for an entire day by accident so that's why the long duration. It's not that long.)

pros

+ good looking and detailed pre rendered graphics
+ stylistic cutscenes. they are very well made.
+ easy and fun puzzles (if you don't want to challenge). notebook is very helpful for puzzle solutions and what should you do next. there are also inventory puzzles you can make and distmantle some items.
+ hotspots are marked to make it easy. No need to hunt for pixels.
+ story is intriguing. you're an detective and investigating some serial child murders.
+ background music is good
+ voice actors speaks persian but they are doing good job.
+ you can learn many things about İranian culture.

cons

- the game mechanics and english translation aren't the best.
- detective's in game and cut scene appearance doesn't match.
- A couple of bugs that affect gameplay

Overall this is an decent and typical old school point and click adventure game. i recommended!

This game is hilariously bad. I like the look of it (illustrated realism), but as has been said by every non-Persian player, the translations are godawful. Apparently, the developers released a patch that updated the translations, but apparently Steam didn't get the memo because they are still very bad. Most of the time you can figure out what's being said, but there are some parts where its impossible to know what the hell they are getting at. There are some odd expressions used. When the doctor or fingerprint tech finishes a conversation, they say, "I did my duty." When a clue doesn't pan out, our hero dramatically writes in his diary in big letters, "the end of hope." And he calls everybody soldier when he's trying to be encouraging. And every phrase in the talk selection list has an exclamation point at the end. (Examining the details of the case!!!! Tell what happened!!!) It feels like everyone is shouting all the time in between spitting on everyone with the harsh Persian language. Even in Persian the writing is piss poor. And the translations get worse as the game wears on. Almost like they started to try to fix them and then got bored with it so gave up and let Google translate (or whatever they use in Iran) take care of it. Some of the hotspots don't exist or show double magnifying glasses which may have something to do with their adding English translations to the game. One of them was for the original Persian and the other English. Has this company ever made a game before? So many amateur mistakes in this game. Lazy and totally strange.

Sound effects are very weird and often erroneous. Anytime we are outside, we hear the sound of seagulls whether we are by water or not. Inside the hallways of the police department, there is the sound of what can only be described as a roller coaster traveling uphill. You can hear the wheels moving along the metal track as it moves toward you. Also, we hear sounds of typing for no reason, but this could be triggered by diary updates even though the diary is handwritten.

The game will not allow you any freedom to make any decisions on your own. It IS an Iranian game after all. If you take longer than 5 seconds to do something, our hero speaks up saying you're taking too long and to use the skip button. He also repeatedly accuses you of wasting time and not wanting to find the murderer. He is very aware that you are controlling his movements and almost treats you like a partner. It's actually a bit refreshing. At one point we have to disassemble a shovel and he adamantly disagrees with this decision but does it anyway. Later he thanks you for being right about it. Very unusual.

What's also weird is the game's obsession with American ads from the 1940s and 50s. Our hero keeps looking at various ads on the wall for cigarettes, broccoli, tobacco, and flashlights. However, the piss poor writing rears its ugly head here too. At one point, a character jokes that he is Sofia Loren. Um, in 1933 Sofia Loren was just a gleam in her father's eye. Not born yet. It isn't a mis-translation in this case because you can hear the guy say her name. Then we read some documents dated in the 1940s! One of them has a web address at the bottom. I'm not sure if they were just being lazy or just picked a year at random to name the game. The cars and clothes are not 30s era either. If they were so fascinated by 1950s American pop culture, why not just have the game take place in the 50s??

Oddly, the newspaper our hero reads has a variety of articles on types of food and clothing worn in Iran with a very modern looking woman in the photo. Tourism must have been down in Iran because it made little sense in the game. What major paper of a capital city would put that on the front page during the height of a global depression while fascism and communism were sweeping over the world? And the Tehran Daily is talking about Persian fashion and food?? Of course one of the game locations is a mosque and your police badge is just a giant Iranian flag so you can't miss it. Bit of propaganda never hurt anyone. Of course all of that is blown to hell when you realize that the Tehran serial killer beheads people. When you find a bottle of acid, our hero mentions throwing acid at someone you love. LOL Not sure if they were being ironic or it just came naturally. Strangely, our hero is dressed like a Hasid in all black with a black hat. Just weird.

This felt a bit like a state-funded game at times. The convoluted story blames the murders on England and Russia holding Iran back in the world. It criticizes the former shah and gets a bit political for a game marketed around the world. Absolutely ridiculous.

Another hilarious thing are the cut scenes. Our hero is a 40 something tall, thin man with jet black hair. When we see him in the cut scenes, he's short with grey hair and a mustache. In another he's blonde and looks to be from California! It felt like the developers had some left over drawings from other games so they used them thinking we wouldn't notice. There wasn't even any attempt by the artists to find out how the character looked! They just drew whatever they wanted.

At the end of the day this game is incredibly easy. Apparently the developers don't trust us to figure anything out ourselves. If you click on our hero's diary, it literally tells you where to go next. (Time to go home and make tea) It even gives you step by step instructions on how to do the inventory puzzles. To make a kite, gather some wastepaper and combine with straw mats....Finally, give it to Mohammad Reza. Look at book on table, go talk to Amiri.) I mean these aren't hits. They're cheats! If that weren't easy enough, there's always a skip button. For inventory puzzles? Maybe they meant this for kids and didn't trust their children to understand how to do these things...?

Despite everything, I continued with it because I find the cultural elements fascinating. It's like a window into history of Iran. At least from a 21st century point of view. One thing that made me laugh out loud were all the wanted posters for Bonnie and Clyde...in an Iranian cop shop. Yeah because of all the places in the world to go on the run, Bonnie and Clyde would hop a boat to IRAN. LOLOL Um, no. Clearly these cops had no idea who they were dealing with. One of the Wanted posters showed a picture of Bonnie and said Wanted for Murder and RAPE. Who did Bonnie rape exactly? All 90 pounds of her. LOL

Some of the puzzles are convoluted and unrealistic. We have to make a knife so we can fix a bell to get inside the morgue. Why wouldn't we just call and ask them to open thee door or knock loudly? And to make a knife to fix the bell? Why not a screwdriver? Is everything associated with violence in 1930s Tehran? We have to start a fire and our guy just adds a whole bunch of things from our inventory that the game wanted to get rid of apparently. Who adds vinegar to a fire? Then he adds anesthetic because he says it will make everyone sleep for a few hours. Including him if this game were at all accurate.

Then they just inserted puzzles into the game for no reason. We go to a location and the guy who answers the door won't let us in until we play tic tac toe with him! This game has all the subtlety of a shovel over the head. At one point we need someone to analyze fingerprints for us and we're told the analyzer is "too restless because he can't solve a magic puzzle." Unless we solve it for him, the fingerprints will have to wait. I mean just ridiculousness! I hate Sudoku so could have really used the skip button here. Luckily there were walkthroughs available.

This game is incredibly simple and good for adventure enthusiasts who don't want much of a challenge and enjoy Sudoku and tic tac toe puzzles. It's a casual adventure game peppered with a bit of Persian culture.

A good point and click adventure in noir setting. Interesting plot with engaging characters and twists. If you are fan of this genre, this game is for you.

this game deserves a mixed review, and it's pretty shameful that Steam has never made that kind of voting possible. in fact, one should be aware that it's not really a game. there are a few puzzle-like actions, but it is mostly a story you watch and an incomplete one. it has animated novel sequences, and then exploring zones but you're very limited in what you can do or interact with there. the puzzles are pretty basic, and in fact i would mostly remove them and just focus on the visuals and story if i were directing this game.

this, and the other games in this series, feel like they want to tell an intriguing story in interesting environments, but without a lot of action (fine, for a point & click) and without the necessary details that would make the story understandable or believable.

for a disclaimer, i believe there's a political tie-in to all three games which involves international intrigues involving the Middle East. i'm not offended by that at all, and it interests me to learn about this era from the perspective of those to whom this history properly belongs. but in order for one to make an interesting story or "game", this needs a lot more details fleshed out. most of this political content happens entirely off-screen and is just mentioned in letters, which makes it confusing as to how it ties into the story that the "player" is engaged with.

so, i would advise anyone before they buy this trilogy of games---they are unfinished. they just kind of end and you're left with a murder mystery that is somehow tied into a political story that for some reason is not being fully fleshed out, some good artwork and even an interesting main character that you like, and a strong feeling of unresolvedness.

i would love to see them completed, actually.

I am going to give a recommendation although I am on the fence with this one. It is very very rough, with quite a collection of bugs and glitches and a translation that is not the best written English around, but the location is unique (though, and I risk it saying this without being from there, I feel a lot of anachronisms going on) and that actually gives a lot of interest to a point n click game that feels, again, like Still Life and Mystery of the Druids mixed together.

Music is nice but glitches make that two tunes are playing at the same time. The backgrounds and animations are ok but there are moments where the perspective is lost because the collision is not well designed. The investigation is interesting, though it is weird to have the cutscenes portraying a different main character than the one you have in the normal game. It is barely comfortable to play, but it has TWO hint systems plus the hotspot detection, something I consider really generous and nice.

To be completely honest, I would give a more clear recommendation, despite its bugs and translation, if it did not felt so much like a deja vu of so many identical adventures but spoken in Farsi. And this is the real problem of this game: so, so derivative. Nice to play, but derivative.

Game is very confusing and not fun at all.