And yet I can't help but adore it. All the weirdness joins together into one big ball of DETECTIVES with the energy of a shonen anime tournament arc. The graphic style is weird, but it's consistent, and there's tons of assets so it feels like it's the result of a conscious decision rather than a monetary restriction. The unorthodox plot structure has some drawbacks, but also keeps the game from ever getting predictable. And the silly sense of humor, while sometimes tonally dissonant, gives the game a charm of its own.
As the name implies, Methods is about a detective competition. One hundred detectives have been gathered to compete in intellectual tests to determine which of them is the best. The prize is one million dollars. However, the Gamemaster has also gathered one hundred criminals in a tournament of their own. The competition is capped off with a one-on-one duel between the final detective and the final criminal, with the victor getting the one million dollars—but if the criminal wins, they also receive their freedom. So the primary motivator for most detectives is not money or glory, but to prevent a dangerous criminal from being released back onto the streets.
Most of the game is spent following detectives as they proceed through the tournament and solve the various mysteries. I won't explain the nitty-gritty rules, but the big picture is that the detectives are all organized into pairs and race to solve various fake incidents the quickest. Each round has a theme, and the murders are replicated with stuffed dummies. The lowest-ranked detectives are regularly eliminated, so the competition gets tighter and tighter as it goes on.
However, the viewpoint character shifts several times over the course of the story. This is great in some respects, since it prevents the story from ever getting routine. We don't immediately know who the winner (or at least finalist) will be, since there is no one protagonist. Some of the protagonists aren't even detectives in the competition, so you really never know who you'll be following next. But unfortunately, the constant protagonist swapping also causes the cast to be spread out a bit too thinly. We follow and grow attached to one protagonist, and then they get eliminated from the competition off-screen while we're with the next protagonist. While losers are inevitable, it feels a bit unceremonious for our (former) protagonists.
One overarching mystery that confronts many of the detectives is the identity of the mysterious Gamemaster running the competition. It's four weirdos spying on all the participants in a room filled with screens. The game periodically cuts to the Gamemasters' room and gives us a behind-the-scenes look at the operation of the tournament. In most games the Gamemaster's identity would be one of the big twists, but Methods continues its maverick approach by presenting us with the solution upfront, even as several character spend most of the game trying to learn this information.
The mysteries can be divided into two groups: the short mysteries that the detectives solve for the competition, and the larger mysteries brought up by the game's plot.
If you've ever read one of those "X Minute Mysteries" books you already have a pretty good idea of what the individual competition rounds are like. The murder methods and crime scenes are interesting, but the solutions are generally pretty clear after a cursory investigation of the scene (as evidenced by the fact that the purpose of the competition is to solve the mysteries after a cursory investigation of the scene) and wouldn't hold up as "real" mysteries in other contexts. If you're expecting mysteries you'll probably find them tiresome, but if you approach them as riddles they'll be a lot more palatable.
The overarching mysteries are deeper... but still never approach anything that could pass in a traditional detective novel. Methods functions much more like a thriller or suspense story than a blank-dunit. Plot threads can be abruptly resolved or put on hold, which keeps us on our toes, but also sometimes reduces satisfaction. At least every plot point (save one sequel hook) is resolved by the end.
The only gameplay is in the competition rounds. First you investigate the crime scene: icons show you everything that can be examined, so there's no pixel-hunting. Once you've done that, the characters will automatically start theorizing and deducing, and you need to complete their reasoning by answering a few multiple choice questions. It's simple yet effective gameplay for relatively straightforward mysteries. Almost every detective also has a unique investigation technique, which translates into some sort of additional mini-game.
However, if you make too many (read as: any) wrong answers, when you finish the segment you'll learn that you took too long, drop some ranks, get a game over, and be sent to the start of the reasoning segment. While this wasn't a major annoyance, since the reasoning segments are relatively short and you know all the answers the second time, it felt a bit weird that even after the game knew I would be getting a game over because I got a wrong answer, it would still make me play through the remainder of the segment, and then repeat the exact same segment after the game over. Again, this wasn't a major issue, but it probably would have felt more streamlined to either give an immediate game over or just do away with them.
I think it bears repeating that the gameplay is only in the mini-mysteries. In other words, the larger mysteries have absolutely no player input whatsoever, and are all resolved by the characters within the story. This is further proof towards the thriller/suspense classification I made earlier. Methods reminded me a lot of Professor Layton in this respect: there's a series of small riddles that you solve entwined within a semi-related overarching linear story.
While the characters use rough, 2D sprites, the backgrounds are slick, 3D renders. The clash is a bit unnerving at first, but I quickly got used to it. And considering what the sprites look like, it's probably for the best the backgrounds were done differently.... There are a lot of locations. Every single mystery gets a unique crime scene, the competition location has a lot of areas, and each room has a lot of different shots from various angles. Plus there's a fair number of CGs. I really, really appreciate the overwhelming amount of graphic assets in the game. While the rough-looking sprites and the fact that the sprites and backgrounds were done in different styles at first make it feel like the game might have had graphical limitations, the sheer number of sprites, backgrounds and CGs prove that LockedOn took their graphic style to the limit.
The OST was pretty long, too. Just like all the assets in the game, it doesn't feel like LockedOn held anything back. A lot of the songs follow a similar drum-and-bass framework with recurring leitmotifs, which is why I think a lot of the individual songs ended up not particularly impactful—but the massive amount of songs with similar but distinct themes and instrumentations lets LockedOn pick the exact perfect song for each scene. When it comes to the music, he paints in tones, not hues. While the lack of strong, defined melodies and presence of variations prevented the individual songs from being particularly memorable for me, the soundtrack succeeds in laying a cool vibe over the entire game.
All this has basically been technical points. What really ties Methods together is its style. As I've already said several times, it's... weird.
The character designs might look scraggly with have unfocused eyes, but their soul is straight from anime. Everyone has a distinctive, larger-than-life outfit, name, and personality. While most real-life people would probably approach an investigation in the same general way, every detective in Methods must have some sort of special investigative "method" unique to them. For instance, one detective knows a bunch of trivia, while another detective make deductions using a ouija board. This is very, very anime, except with investigation styles rather than superpowers or fighting styles.
Once you stop taking the characters seriously, they're quite endearing. There's a lot of them, too, each of them with their own crazy design. It might seem a bit weird to have a character who shows up for one conversation that never appears again... but the fact that characters like this exist also mean you can never tell that someone will be important just from the fact that they show up. Whenever you meet a new character, they can range from a one-off gag to the next protagonist.
...Most of the characters are endearing, at least. I found the killers to be a bit off-putting. Just like the detectives have methods, each killer has a unique modus operandi for killing people. The issue is the fact that the killers are killers and their modus operandi are part of their personalities. Despite their weirdness, the detectives each have a core of humanity, but "liking to kill people" is not a character trait that rings true. The criminals of Methods feel out-of-place, even for Methods, and treating murder so lightly almost feels tactless.
Also, some of the characters are supposed to come from various countries, but it's very hard to tell since there's no voice acting (as we can't hear their accents).
We have a pretty wacky cast of characters, so they naturally end up in a pretty wacky world. However, it can be a bit tonally inconsistent. Sometimes the games wants to be serious, like at the detectives' concerns of a killer going free due to the competition or nods to real-life over-incarceration issues, but then we go back to clown detectives who solve cases by doing handstands. Games like Ace Attorney manage to perfectly balance their comedy and drama in a way that Methods just can't quite replicate.
And fair warning: Methods casually spoils the solution to Murder on the Orient Express. I don't care how famous the book is, spoiling a mystery without warning isn't cool. (UPDATE: Apparently the author is going to update this line, so this point is now moot!)
Once you get into it and realize what it is, Methods: The Detective Competition is a ride. I think the subtitle "The Detective Competition" is very important, because at the end of the day, that's what the game is about: it's about the competition, not the murders, or the detectives, or their methods. It's not a traditional whodunit. In fact, Methods isn't really a "traditional" anything. The sheer unorthodoxy gives the story a few rough edges, but prevents it from ever feeling stale or predictable. The art style is a bit strange, but you can tell LockedOn didn't spare any expense in creating assets for every single person, place, and thing he wanted to introduce. You need to give the game a bit of room to have a world where it can host a country-spanning competition with 100 detectives who each have a unique investigation gimmick, but if you let yourself into that world, you'll have a blast.
Methods might look a bit questionable at first glance, but I give it my wholehearted recommendation to every mystery fan who also likes anime—which, if you're on this blog and made it to the end of this review, most likely includes you.
No comments:
Post a Comment