A rich guy has been murdered in his isolated mansion. You play as Clark, the new assistant for Detective Knox, a police inspector famous for solving all of his cases in one day. Or... do you play as Knox? The prose seems to be written from Clark’s point of view, but your decisions guide Knox’s actions. Bah, it doesn’t really matter.
The game is short; I was able to breeze through it in a little over an hour. Most of the game covers Clark and Knox’s investigation. You don’t have any control over the physical inspections, but you do get to choose what questions Knox asks the witnesses. Your choices largely don’t matter. At the end of the game you get to accuse one of the suspects and (through simple multiple-choice questions) explain how they did it.
The mystery is... bold. Bold in how the solution is ridiculously unfair and cliché for anyone familiar with the genre, and yet is presently proudly and earnestly. There are actually a few conceivable solutions, but if you present one of the “wrong” ones at the denouement, the game will pull contradictory evidence or testimony out of thin air, so the final segment really just becomes trial and error. The game also does try to clue the solution, and I give them a few points for their effort, but unfortunately it just doesn’t work out well enough.
The graphics are thoroughly lacking. The backgrounds are real photos that have been processed, like those used in the original When They Cry games, but I’m not sure they were all processed the same way, and the angle of the backgrounds doesn’t fit the sprites very well.
And speaking of the sprites, they could definitely use a lot of improvement. A Detective’s Novel was clearly made on a budget. I get that. I respect that they had to make the assets on a tight constraint. Even that being so, the sprites just aren’t at an acceptable quality. There are two main issues: consistency and spacing.
The first and bigger issue is that the sprites are not drawn consistently. As a result, the characters seem to squirm and dance as they talk and their poses change. It’s distracting and doesn’t look good.
The second issue is that the sprites are too small for the screen and spaced too far apart from each other. There’s a lot of empty space on-screen, and it takes a lot of eye movement to check the text box and each sprite on each message.
These are technical issues that should be handled—and that your artist should be able to handle—regardless of the actual quality of the sprites. As a result, the presence of these issues suggests a lack of care and diligence. If you want an example of sprites that aren’t that great, but are consistent and properly sized, just look at the original When They Cry games again. Even though the sprites are clearly of a lower quality than big-budget games, the consistency at least creates an aesthetic.
Even the programming isn’t up to snuff. There were a couple of places where code fragments appeared in the text box, and I got a random error message at one point.
The writing, the lifeblood of any mystery, is unfortunately just as flawed as the rest of the game. The issues are both technical and stylistic.
The technical issues should be immediately apparent to anyone proficient in English: the game is riddled with typos. The team that created the game is apparently Croatian, so I understand the difficulty of writing in a foreign language, but unless they were supremely confident in their English skills (which they clearly shouldn’t be) they should have gotten a native English speaker to proofread their script.
The stylistic issues are a bit more ethereal, and not quite as severe. The writing is just a bit too stilted, and there isn’t quite enough development. The characters do have unique personalities, but they needed to be drawn out a bit more. Conversations are fragmented, with information coming out of the blue or being changed slightly from scene to scene. Knox is sarcastic and lackadaisical, and his banter is probably the best part of the game but also sometimes too modern for a game that is supposed to be taking place in the 40s.
The music is the one part of this game that I have no complaints about. It’s smooth, jazzy, and fits the atmosphere. There aren’t that many tracks, but there don’t need to be.
So as should be apparent, A Detective’s Novel is thoroughly mediocre, at best. I acknowledge that actually making, finishing, and publishing a game at all requires a certain amount of effort and diligence that a lot of people don’t have, but that doesn’t salvage the quality of the final product. If you have one dollar and one hour to kill and truly are a mystery nut, I don’t think it’s a waste of the time and monetary investment, but you won’t be missing much if you decide to pass.
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