Short version: I kind of wanted to root for this game, because it tells a good yarn and the setting is interesting, but it’s got too many technical problems.
Long version:
I actually liked the setting of this game and the way it’s set up. It’s a standard noir detective story about an affair and a murder, but set on another planet. The outer space and futuristic elements are introduced gradually, so you get used to the idea of there being green people and teleporters. If you’re going to have weird elements in your game setting, this is a nice way of going about it: setting it in a backdrop of a genre that’s otherwise more down-to-earth.
I also liked that there’s a wide variety of female characters in this game with different jobs and roles in the game. There are male NPCs, but many of the NPCs who fill critical roles are women. You can also ask almost all of them out, as far as I could tell, though only one would actually agree. This is an idea I love for a detective game (or, really, lots of games. Flirt with all the womens!). But, alas, it seems to have come at the expense of women answering more objective-related questions that I would otherwise like to ask them. For example, I can ask my client, Maisy, if she’d consider going out with me, but I can’t seem to figure out the syntax for telling her I found out her husband had an affair. Guessing which topics certain people will discuss with you is an exercise in frustration.
I played this game for the full two hours, but wasn’t able to finish it. I was really giving it an honest shot at solving it without the help files and walkthroughs, and it seemed straightforward. But when, after about an hour and a half, I realized I hadn’t figured out how to end this thing, I consulted the help files in the game, I discovered that a game-critical clue – a matchbook with an address – wasn’t even mentioned in the room description of the place it was found, and wasn’t located in a particularly obvious place. However, I needed it to move on with the game.
Later, once I got the titular artifact (the method by which you have to do this isn’t terribly obvious, and to me felt more like guesswork than real detective work), a critical bug rendered the game still-unfinishable within the time limit. I was trying to show the artifact to my detective partner, Munroe, and ended up handing it to her. She immediately says she’s going to go and return it to its rightful place – okay – and then walks off. The Falcon, however, doesn’t leave my inventory, so I can hand it to other people as well. I left the bar where Munroe was sitting, and came back to discover she was gone. I couldn’t hand her the rest of my notes, and I couldn’t figure out how to get Maisy out of jail. Despite that, I could also hand Maisy the Falcon… she would claim that she was ready to give it back, also, but she was still trapped in jail so it seemed pretty unlikely she would do this.
I screencapped a few other weird things, just for fun:
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