I want to love this game. I really, really do.

It released nearly two years ago now. I took a break because it was pretty jank last time I tried to play, figured we'd had a few major updates and some serious bug fixes since, let me give it another try.

Started the curated Tutorial, to remind myself how to play.

Make it as far as the murdered guy's apartment. Next step in the tutorial, "Find an ID (look around)"

I spent 30 minutes tearing apart this guy's apartment. Picked up and moved everything that can be moved. Interacted with every single interactable in the apartment. Checked every drawer, 4+ times. Hid under the bed. Pulled out every interactable book on the shelves. LITERALLY searched every nook and cranny in case the worldgen had spawned it in a weird place on the floor. Checked inside the damn oven.

There is not an ID card in this apartment. Tutorial, the CURATED non-entirely randomly generated tutorial, broken on a simple step.

If the tutorial will break, imagine the actual procedurally generated crimes.

I'll try again if he ever patches the game to fix such glaringly simple and gamebreaking bugs. If he ever does, I'll update this review.

The game is pretty fun when you are just starting out and discovering everything. It's also pretty unique and tries something that is the game industry is really lacking right now. I'd recommend it if the devs were trying to improve it, but that does not seem to be the case, so I'll judge it as a finished product.

For something that calls itself a "immersive detective simulator", this game isn't immersive at all. The worst offender is probably the complete lack of consequences for player actions. You can break into a guy's house, knock out his wife in front of him, open his safe, steal all his stuff, go out the front door and run away for like 10 to 20 seconds, then come back, knock on his door, ask him to come in and he's like "Of course, make yourself at home :)". All your crimes are pardoned and you don't even have to return the $20k diamonds you stolen right in front of him and 2 cameras. Because of this, if you want money to mean anything, you pretty much need to make it a house rule not to steal anything.

The NPCs really feel like lifeless robots. They will never remember you or anything you done, your interaction with them is very limited and they're usually pretty unhelpful, which is really sad since interrogation is a big part of investigation. You can ask an NPC about the victim and they'll respond like "Oh yeah, I saw them near X" as if they were still alive and walking around. The partner of a victim is just as likely to let you inside their house to investigate (or be helpful in any kind of way) as the murderer. If someone is murdered inside their house and they have a partner, the partner will stand outside the house knocking on the door trying to get in as if nothing happened. In fact, the entire NPCs routine is very weird and buggy.

Speaking of which, there are also tons of bugs, but I didn't find anything game-breaking while I was playing. The procedural generation is OK, sometimes it generates broken stuff but there is a good variety of NPCs, buildings, rooms, notes, emails, even cases. It's pretty impressive. However, due to the nature of it, things are bound to start repeating. I had 2 murder cases back to back that were basically the same case with different NPCs. The side jobs can generate some really insane cases like "find this person, they have blue eyes, blond hair and their shoe size is 14. Good luck :)".

Overall, I'd say the game is decent, though I expected more. You can definitely play it for a while as long as you don't expect much of it. The biggest issue to me is that it's very easy to see the "cracks in the simulation", so it's very difficult to get immersed, which seems to be what this game tried to do.

The devs pretty much abandoned this game because they didn't win the Labor of Love award, which is the exact reason they didn't win. I loved this game so much for its potential but it's so deeply unfinished and buggy, it's an insult to everyone who's supported it to claim it's not still in early access.
It's fun for a few hours and no game really captures that dystopian detective setting without a linear narrative, but it doesn't take long before you hit a game breaking bug and have to start over. Just wish it was made by devs who actually gave a ♥♥♥♥