Operation Backlog Completion 2026

Celebrating All Things Mysterious: The Innsmouth Case

 Celebrating All Things Mysterious, Reviews, Video games  4 Responses »  Tagged with:
May 262023
 

The Innsmouth Case is a short interactive fiction story about a detective hired to investigate the disappearance of a little girl in Innsmouth.

Now, I love H.P. Lovecraft’s stories, games based on them, and detective stories, and this one is also a comedy, so I had high hopes.

I finally added an “interactive fiction” tag for this one, because while it does have some visuals, it’s primarily text-based and is even presented as the pages of a book. Scenery and characters appear at the top of the page, while the text appears to tell the story and present you with choices.

These choices have a variety of effects, with some leading to major branches while others can influence things later down the line, which means there’s a lot of variability.

When you reach an ending, you can easily reload a previous chapter if you don’t want to start over from the beginning. You can also skip through text to reach the next choice. This is good, since there’s a lot of trial and error involved. While some choices expect you to reason through what a smart reaction would be, others can’t be predicted (and finding the lost girl requires more guesswork than detective work).

However, I didn’t feel compelled to seek out all the endings or try to see all the branching paths, because it just didn’t have the heart I was hoping for.

Like I mentioned above, The Innsmouth Case is a comedy, despite being based on Lovecraftian horror. Its store page describes it as “the first scary-comedy-text-adventure of its kind,” but I wouldn’t go that far. As far as horror goes, The Innsmouth Case isn’t particularly scary, although it does have a ton of little nods to H.P. Lovecraft’s work. And when it comes to comedy… well, comedy is subjective, but it didn’t do it for me.

It certainly has an irreverent tone and a goofy approach to its situation, especially if you pick some of the more questionable choices. There were only a few moments that actually made me laugh, though.

In short, The Innsmouth Case isn’t the game to play if you’re looking for horror, a serious detective story, or a hilarious adventure, but if you want a short piece of interactive fiction with many branching paths and nods to Lovecraft, maybe you’ll get more out of it than I did.

We’re nearing the end of our Celebrating All Things Mysterious celebration, but there’s still plenty of time to join in the conversation about any of the games we’ve discussed so far! I’m hoping to end on a high note, so stay tuned for the upcoming reviews next week!

Celebrating All Things Mysterious: Adam Wolfe – A Paranormal Conspiracy in 4 Parts

 Celebrating All Things Mysterious, Reviews, Video games  6 Responses »  Tagged with: ,
May 242023
 

Adam Wolfe is a 4-episode hidden object game in which you play a paranormal detective solving cases while searching for his missing sister.

The first three episodes each have a self-contained supernatural mystery, but they’re all connected by a conspiracy that reaches its conclusion in the fourth episode, which brings everything together.

It is a hidden object game at heart, although one that leans more toward being an adventure game. Using a point-and-click interface, you’ll need to investigate areas to find key items and use them to solve puzzles. You can travel between locations using your map, and occasionally you have special interactions available (such as making a phone call or using your gun).

The puzzles tend to be quite simple and straightforward. Early on in the first episode, you obtain a watch that lets you look into the past (oddly enough, this isn’t the first game with such a mechanic we’ve discussed this May), so occasionally you’ll have to do that in order to proceed. Strangely, these segments require you to move present-time objects to their correct placements in the past in order to see what happened.

While the first episode also has a handful of sections that are more action-oriented, the later episodes minimized these in favor of simple puzzles.

And of course, it has hidden object sequences. What makes Adam Wolfe stand out compared to other hidden object games I’ve played is that the majority of these have narrative significance. Instead of grabbing random items from a list, you’ll be hearing the words to an ancient ritual and need to click the corresponding items, for example. One humorous section has you pick up tool after tool in order to break into a locked box.

Sadly, the last two episodes had some regular hidden object sections instead, which was disappointing, although they didn’t abandon the format entirely.

In terms of its story, Adam Wolfe is interesting enough. While the individual cases aren’t too thrilling (although the first episode is by far the most interesting in terms of the standalone mysteries), I was invested in the overarching plot by episode 3. Unfortunately, the ending was anticlimactic. After everything else that had happened up until that point, the end disappointed me.

Nevertheless, if you enjoy hidden object games, Adam Wolfe takes a bit of unique twist on the formula while telling a decent story, aside from its conclusion.

Celebrating All Things Mysterious: Bustafellows – Great Characters and a Rushed Mystery

 Celebrating All Things Mysterious, Reviews, Video games  10 Responses »  Tagged with: , ,
May 222023
 

Bustafellows is described as a noir mystery otome game, so I was excited to get it when it came out in 2021.

But it came out right while I was still in the middle of The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles, so it got pushed aside and lost in the shuffle of my backlog until this year’s mystery game celebration spurred me to dive into it after all this time.

You play Teuta, a young journalist with the power to send her consciousness back in time a few hours, although she wakes up in the past in someone else’s body. When she sees that a man has been killed, she goes back in time to warn him and becomes mixed up with the “Fixers,” a small group dedicated to bringing justice to people where the law and society have failed them.

Her power is not as important to the story as I expected from the premise. It allows her to save the day at certain critical moments, but most of Bustafellows feels like it could have been written without the time travel.

Bustafellows is a beautiful game with backgrounds that have moving animations (a big deal in a visual novel). It made everything feel more alive, and it really feels high-quality. On the other hand, there are a number of points where characters are talking in the background without a text box appearing on the screen… which I’m sure is just fine if you know Japanese, but if you’re relying on the English translation, that means you need to check the log to find out what the missed lines were, since they’re fortunately translated there.

(Except for the very end, which is a cutscene presented that way, with no ability to view the log since the game ends after that.)

Anyway, Bustafellows is one of those otome games where the love interests are a big group of friends, and I really like that. There are a number of slice of life scenes that are just fun because of the dynamic the characters have with each other, both in the common route and in individual routes.

The common route is a decent length, and your choices across its chapters lead you to one of the individual character routes. Each of these routes has a different focus. They range from mystery investigations to crime thrillers, although the mystery-solving aspect was never as strong as I’d hoped it would be.

I liked most of the love interests, although one just annoyed me and a couple of the others felt like their routes were rushed. Overall, I liked the characters (especially Mozu, my love) enough to make me enjoy my time with Bustafellows…

…Which is good, because the overarching plot doesn’t do it many favors. The common route introduces some mysteries and conspiracies that are largely ignored in the character routes, and then returns to them in two epilogue routes unlocked after all the other routes are complete. Unfortunately, the conclusions feel rushed, which developments that came out of nowhere. Developing those aspects of the story more slowly, with hints dropped throughout the routes, would have made it much better.

In short, Bustafellows shines when it focuses on its characters and their interactions, and stumbles when it tries to bring its mysteries to a satisfactory conclusion.

A sequel is coming out in Japan, and I liked the characters in Bustafellows enough to hope the sequel will be localized. But if it is, I hope it handles its mysteries more carefully, explores Teuta’s time travel powers in more detail, and adds on-screen translations for all of its dialogue.

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