Adventure Gamers - Forums

Wael - 07 October 2014 02:23 AM

Timovieman, you didn’t play the game, as you can perfectly fail, as do over 40% of the players overall in their conclusions.

I know, I didn’t phrase that right. I was referring more to “complete failure” where you didn’t even gather most of the evidence.
That you can still fail even when you have everything at your disposal is great. That you know for sure that you have everything at your disposal because you’ve been railroaded to that point… not so much…

I have just finished the game and even though I did enjoy it, then there are also quite a few things that I didn’t like, and which annoyed me more and more.

First of all I pretty much agree with everything Diego wrote. Having the game tell me when to use Sherlock Talent and Imagination annoyed me, especially in the first case where the scene is very small, but later when the scenes become larger and you only use them very rarely, then I didn’t really mind it as much, as the alternative would have to search the entire areas with Talent constantly on. It does however add to the fact that this is a very easy game that holds your hand at every step and doesn’t have a single actual brain-teaser. But this is what it is, and obviously Frogwares never intended it to be a difficult game.

What however does concern me more is that the whole deduction system neither works as well as I had hoped and expected, nor does it really provide any logical challenges.

When I first heard that the game would have the possibility to end up accusing the wrong person, then I thought that it would give us the option to fail our investigation, that it would be possible to deduce the evidence in the wrong way, or that we could miss some clues that changes everything and would cause us to make false conclusions - But this isn’t the case!

(Okay, I guess it is possible to screw up the case if you make you final conclusion before you have found all the evidence, but remember the game holds your hands and will not only tell you that you are missing some evidence, but also exactly what tasks you haven’t completed and where to complete them. And I guess it is also possible to simply make false conclusions, but let me be blunt here, you have to be pretty daft to actually do that.)

What happens instead is that in the cases were you actually can get it wrong, especially the Blood Bath and the Kew Garden cases, then we will end up with respectively 3 and 2 suspects. Each has both motive, means and opportunity and there is an equal amount of evidence pointing towards each of them, so instead of deducing who the culprit is based on the evidence, then we are forced to simply decide who we think is the most likely culprit! But that is not giving us the option to fail in our investigation or making false conclusion - That is not how things are suppose to work, you can’t just accuse someone of murder based on who you guess is the culprit! - That is reducing Holmes to a lazy hack, that accuses people based on guesswork and gut-feeling, instead of what the evidence tells him.

Okay to be fair, in the Blood Bath case, there is actually some extra evidence or clues that makes the actual culprit the most likely suspect, but this extra evidence is never added to the neural map. I can only assume that this is because it would make it too obvious who the actual culprit is, and they want us to guess instead of deduce. But this also means that in order to solve the case correctly we are suppose to ignore the whole deduction part of the game, and make our actual conclusion based solely on what is not included in the deduction?!?

Then there is “the case of the missing neurons”. Sometimes we make conclusions that are added to the neural map, and then they just magically disappear into thin air! In at least one case only to reappear when we combine two new clues to make the exact same conclusion, and in others when we find new evidence that invalidates these conclusion, but why delete them? The evidence we found are still valid, and the sub-conclusion isn’t necessarily invalid in itself, it is only the overall conclusion that changes, so why not simply connect these two conclusion and let us decide on the right interpretation? To me it seem like they at every cost wanted to make sure that the neural map doesn’t get to big and complicated, and that it doesn’t provide any possibility to actually get things wrong, of course apart from the “who do I think did it” part.

Then we have the moral decision (condemn/absolve) at the end of each case. When I heard of these I thought it would be in the form of “we know (s)he did it, but there are some mitigating circumstances so perhaps we should just let it slide”, or “what is the best course of action here”. But that is only the case in two of the cases the Abbey Grange Affair and Riddle on the Rails, instead the rest comes down to “Cold blooded murder” vs. “Self defence” or something similar, but this isn’t a moral choice or a condemn/absolve situation, this is something that our investigation should have revealed! And if for instance the clues and evidence points towards self defence, then the moral choice could have been “let him/her get away” or “tell the police and let the court decide”.

Now I know that all the above can make it look like I hated the game (and I have not even mentioned the mini-games or what I see as a major flaw in one of the cases) but despite of this I still enjoyed the game. It is just that it could have been so much better if they hadn’t dropped the ball in the execution of all the good ideas they had.

A.A - 09 October 2014 03:23 AM

Oh, come on now! You can’t just go and write 10 paragraphs on all the things that annoyed you and then throw in the line “but I did enjoy the game”. I mean, really…let’s hear why.

It is not meant as a review, instead it is some (constructive) critique of the areas where I thought they could have done it better, and simply the things I wanted to get off my chest I might write a user review later, which won’t be all about what annoyed me, but also about the positive things.

And I still enjoyed the deduction part, even though it didn’t live up to my expectations.

Oscar - 09 October 2014 03:32 AM

How is it that people have already completed the game and giving their ratings already? Wasn’t the game just released? Maybe I’m stuck in the old days where games used to take weeks if not months to complete (usually months in my case), but it’s not a good sign for someone like me who likes to savour games and gets huge satisfaction for spending weeks on a puzzle and finally figuring it out.

Released over a week ago, about 15-20 hours gametime, and absolutely no possibility whatsoever of getting stuck on a puzzle.

Iznogood - 09 October 2014 03:44 AM

Released over a week ago, about 15-20 hours gametime, and absolutely no possibility whatsoever of getting stuck on a puzzle.

Plus 5 hours of constant loading time.

Wael - 09 October 2014 08:52 AM

(including 84% pirates)

How do you know that?

And ugh, is it really that bad?

Wael - 09 October 2014 08:52 AM

So far, all players (including 84% pirates) are true only 57% of the time, 43% of them chose the wrong suspect.

I did end up accusing the wrong suspect in two of the cases myself, yes I checked and replayed the ending. But that was also the two cases I described above, where it all comes down to who you think did it or simply making a coin-toss. So the number of people who “failed” in at least these two cases, has nothing to do with the difficulty of the deductions, only with the pure-guesswork or coin-toss nature of those 2 cases.

As for the rest, well the in game statistics reports a higher “success” rate, in fact over 90% correct accusations in the last case.

Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t think neither the game nor the deduction system is terrible, in fact I think the idea of the deductions system and having the possibility of accusing the wrong suspect is brilliant. I loved the story in the individual cases, well most of them at least, the graphics especially the character close-ups was excellent, and the voice acting was superb.

But I also think that the whole game has a very low overall difficult, and that the deduction system was both made overly simplistic and had some major flaws. And especially the flaws and simplicity of the deductions, is what prevents it from being a great game.

Wael - 09 October 2014 08:52 AM

and they got stuck too, for days. As in this topic.

http://steamcommunity.com/app/241260/discussions/0/613937943167886442/

Iznogood - 09 October 2014 03:44 AM

and absolutely no possibility whatsoever of getting stuck on a puzzle for any experienced adventure gamer.

fixed

Gabe - 09 October 2014 11:12 AM

Plus 5 hours of constant loading time.

An exaggeration, but the loading times when changing scenes are exceptional long, easily a full minute, and it almost drove me mad in the beginning. Later I learned to live with it and use the pauses for other things.