Celebrating All Things Mysterious: Sarawak

The first thing that stands out about Sarawak is its visual style.

While I’ve tagged this review with the “visual novel” tag, Sarawak is closer to interactive fiction. Text appears on the screen to be read novel-style, and pictures appear alongside the text to accompany it.

The style almost feels like that of a pop-up book, which makes it stand out.

You play as a young woman who is contacted by the police to inform her that her mother has been arrested under suspicion of murdering a professor. Troubled by this, you begin your own investigation.

Although there are several choices to make, these mainly influence dialogue and provide some extra story details, while the story itself follows a fairly linear path. Occasionally, you need to interact with the images in order to solve puzzles. For example, when you come across a locked gate with a number of gears on it, you must move the gears into the correct positions to unlock the gate.

The puzzles can be a little strange, but they’re fairly simple and straightforward.

The murder mystery takes a backseat to learning more about the professor’s past, but it still builds up a compelling story and what felt like it could be a larger conspiracy… until the murder case abruptly wrapped up and the next screen said “The End.” My surprise was partly my own doing, since I’d looked at the chapter select screen and misremembered the number of chapters, but even if I hadn’t mistakenly believed I was only 2/3 through the story, the ending would have still felt abrupt.

So Sarawak left me with mixed feelings. I love its presentation and it has an interesting enough story, but I felt like the story was just getting good when it ended. A longer story in this style with a more fleshed-out mystery might have been really compelling.