Hey, a bump. I'll take that as an opportunity to share my thoughts on it! Got it a few weeks back, starving for a good mystery game.
It sort of delivered, I guess? It's always refreshing to see a 3D game come around and not focus on action, but on exploration and solving puzzles. In the end it did feel kind of undercooked, though. Ronan and Joy were decent enough characters and it was easy to build a connection to them, and characters overall were well directed. Not the most interesting of characters, but they pulled their weight through the story. The bigger problem was that the story wasn't very interesting in itself. There wasn't enough of a connection built to the killer for me to care about who it was and how to stop him. I'm not sure why, maybe it was due to Ronan mostly just stumbling to one definite lead after the next instead of slowly piecing them together? The game is sort of open world but doesn't really use it to support it's story or systems, which I always dislike in games. I assume that the team had some ambitions when starting up which didn't come through in time for the deadlines, sadface.
Investigation scenes were mostly decent, it was often fun to piece events together. I'd say it was too little actual effort needed, most clues that could be collected were unnecessary filler, the ones needed to proceed often obvious after collection. Not getting a real penalty for choosing wrong was... well, alright I guess. It mostly came down to forcing yourself to think things through before picking to avoid the shame of being wrong. Some solutions were a bit obtuse so it's fair enough to let players move forward after some failures. I wish they did something more, though. The system didn't vary itself up through the game and that was basically it as far as interesting things to do.
The best part of the game I'd say were the ghost stories. Well acted and spooky enough, I loved how atmospheric they made the game. Too bad that they were locked behind god awful collectables. I enjoy exploring levels to find cool stuff but vacuuming areas to find every piece of eight is terribly boring and kills pacing (as did the terribad demon hunts for that matter).
Between these stories, a decent cast and some very good scenes I enjoyed the game, although I wish they'd used both the gameplay systems and open world in more (and more interesting) ways than they did. I wonder how much they had to cut to make SE's deadlines.
