What I usually want from an FMV adventure game is either fun quick paced “interactive movie” experience, where every choice I make leads to a new interesting possibility, or a solid adventure game where the FMV is just a visual style. The Shapeshifting Detective is neither.
The Shapeshifting Detective is a mystery/detective adventure game where the main gimmick is that you can turn into any of the characters you’ve met to get some information out of the other characters you wouldn’t be able to as “yourself”. All while not revealing your ability, of course. And it’s such an incredibly fun premise. Shame it couldn’t shapeshift into a good execution.
What this setup calls for is a highly reactive and dynamic gameplay, where you Hitman but with dialogues. And try to be very careful with your dialogue choices. Heck, maybe even have a good old text parser instead of pre-written dialogue options. What we get is a slog, where you talk to the same people over and over again, with an inconvenient single “change form” spot you must return to, until the game decides that you’ve done enough to deserve to move to the next chapter.
It’s neat that there are multiple possible culprits. But this concept isn’t really explored in a way where you piece facts together over the course of the entire game, rather there are several extremely specific points where you can get definitive clues, while most of the other dialogues are just vague and prove nothing. Not helped by the fact, most characters are unlikable, the game has no respect for player time and lots of “meta” plot elements are just horribly written.
While far from the worst FMV title I’ve played, The Shapeshifting Detective is simply not fun to play, while it’s story just isn’t worth the effort to sit through it until the end.