While I’m primarily a sci-fi/fantasy nerd, it’s not the only thing I enjoy reading. Outside of the likes of Tolkien, McAfferey, Drake, and Herbert, I enjoy a good old fashioned murder mystery. Doyle, Poe, Chandler, Rendell, along with more modern mystery writers like Walter Mosley and Gillian Flynn, they’ve all got a place on my shelves and in my reader’s heart. Naturally, this has also influenced my gaming life to a degree, though I’ve found it harder to find good mystery games which satisfy me the same way a good book or short story does. So it was with some anticipation that I looked forward to Detective – The Test, the latest iteration of an ongoing series from developer k148 Game Studio, with the previous entry being DETECTIVE – The Motel. And my enthusiasm was badly misplaced.
Detective – The Test puts you in the shoes of an investigator who must go through three different crime scenes without any assistance to try and figure out the whos, the when, and occasionally the why. You must derive the solutions only from the clues presented. Once you’ve got everything plugged in on your handy dandy little tablet, you submit your final solution and get a ranking, with “A+” being the best.
When you see the Unreal Engine logo flashing up as you start a game, you expect a certain degree of visual quality. And Detective – The Test doesn’t look bad per se. But, at the same time, it doesn’t feel like it’s breaking any ground. The environments, when all is said and done, are just big boxes you move around in. There are slightly flat textures in certain spots, just enough detail to work with from a game perspective but not quite enough to immerse you. It’s only when you look more closely that you see how badly the developers misused, or at least failed to properly implement, various features of the engine. And having seen it, it taints the whole experience. It doesn’t look like a polished product, but more like somebody’s portfolio project that they slapped a logo screen on and decided to charge money for. You hear a lot of people complaining about “asset flip” games, but this might be the first one I’ve come across that could plausibly fall into that category. About the only redeeming feature is that the UI is at least usable without getting in the player’s way, and that’s not nearly the compliment one would expect it to be.
If the visuals are disappointing, the audio is even worse. On the plus side, you’ve got ambient sounds which help at least give some heft to the scenes you’re exploring. One scene has a bit of voice acting which isn’t terrible, but also isn’t particularly compelling, either. What passes for music in Detective – The Test is formless, passionless, and vaguely irritating. The developers would have done better to drop the music entirely, taking a page from Night Of The Living Dead to heighten whatever narrative tension they might try to generate. More on that in a bit.
The gameplay in Detective – The Test is borderline insulting in its simplicity and its pretensions. You step into the oversized diorama, you wander around, occasionally finding hot spots which bring up certain pieces evidence, and you’re reminded at the start of every scene to “write things down in a notebook.” To solve the mystery, you have to properly identify all the people involved, the guilty party, the day or time when the incident went down, and occasionally the reason. Submit your answers and it’ll tell you how many clues you got right. But even if you get one clue wrong, it doesn’t end your run through the scenario. You can just brute force that last element until it’s all right, at which point it will end the run. That said, none of these scenarios are really that difficult. I burned through the entire game in less than an hour. Without writing down a damn thing! When you hear complaints about a certain game being a “walking simulator,” this one fits the bill so perfectly it’s not even funny.
I want to discuss the narrative elements of Detective – The Test. But I can’t, because there really aren’t any. We’ve got just enough in terms of background info in each scene to make our deductions, but they exist in isolation from each other. Worse, they have no particular bearing on us either as a player or a character. If this is supposed to be a test, for what organization are we testing? The local cops? The Staties? The Feds? The Pinkertons? Are these actual crime scenes or are we going through the equivalent of “Hogan’s Alley” which only simulates scenes as a training exercise? Since there’s no connective tissue between any of the three scenarios, we can only guess, which in context is bitterly ironic. There’s just no meat to this title from a narrative perspective. There’s not even a crouton.
Flat out, there’s literally nothing here that could possibly justify the asking price, no matter how absurdly low it might be. Case closed.
Axel reviewed Detective: The Test on PlayStation 5 with a provided review copy.
