I tend to dislike most FMV games. I loved this one.
This is a nice FMV detective game with lots of charismatic characters and surprisingly engaging story. It’s just enough hammy to be unforgettably charming and just enough serious to be actually interesting. It has quite simple and no fail-state design with very stylish presentation and not too much unskippable repeating imagery and very simplistic, but interesting gameplay focused on interviewing people and cross-referencing the things you are being told. There’s just enough interaction and thinking to spot the contradictions and just enough entertaining watching parts with dialogue for the game to not get boring in the 3-5 hours it lasts.
It does have some issues – the controls for the game are surprisingly clunky and do not use mouse at all for one. A rather strange choice for the clearly point-and-click-perfect game, although, this may have been intended for touch controls, hence the weird limitation. The story focuses a lot on the bigger plot for most of the game, which doesn’t actually get resolved by the end, with only the initial whodunit potential murder being solved, while everything else left for the openly hinted potential continuation. And the game doesn’t really have enough contradiction gameplay happening overall – there’s tons of facts you can gather, but most reveals happen in quick succession due to one-two new items or encounters, and then don’t happen at all no matter how much you talk to different characters about different things. Game being linear and having encounters you need to get around town to progress the story (most of which just happen, you don’t expect them to) also doesn’t help the situation. All these things are not deal breakers, but certainly aren’t good.
Overall, this game was very fun to play and I’d love to see more of these characters.