Post Mortem

Post Mortem lets you take different approaches to your investigation, which influences which leads you get, characters you meet and locations you unlock. In theory, that's very dynamic story-telling, and at times, you actually feel like an investigator following leads and going where the clues take him. Notice the qualifiers? Sadly, numerous flaws cripple this otherwise engaging murder mystery. - You can't skip dialogue so you’ll hear the same awkwardly-paced lines again and again if you have to reload. This also makes replaying the game to see different paths more tedious. - The “first person view” (actually rendered 360° images) makes finding and interacting with objects a chore. Hope you clicked the pixels you need for the good endings! - The English translation is pretty bad: dialogue lines are often mismatched as if translated in isolation, and the translator was clearly struggling with idioms. E.g. the police chief – who you already know is deliberately dragging his feet on the investigation – is described as “bending over backwards working on this case. He didn’t even cross-check the witness statements”. I guess whoever wrote this thought “bend over backwards” meant the same as “laid-back/lazy”. - Worse still, the devs failed to account for all of the possible paths, causing awkward lurches in story progression. In my playthrough, Gus started talking about the main MacGuffin without ever having heard of it before. On the technical side, users of newer Windows versions will need 3rd party fixes or mess with the compatibility setting for this to start at all, and alt-tabbing or leaving the game screen will crash the game. I’d have expected at least the first issue pre-fixed in the GOG version… So, I’d only recommend this game to mystery investigation fans, adventure game completionists, people who like to chuckle at weird translations, and people who enjoy ambitious attempts at presenting something engaging, even if the devs didn’t manage to fully realize it.

Let me start off by saying that I usually can find entertainment in these smaller mystery games, even when the story is cheesy or the graphics are awkward or the gameplay strange... I'm forgiving as long as I have a good time! This offered me no such thing. The dialogue was a trainwreck... Often you could refer to something you hadn't even mentioned before, so it was extremely difficult to have the conversations flow or make sense. Tons of unnecessary screens and turns for very little content. It could take you 7 clicks and turning after each one to get to a room, with little to no (interesting) environment to look at on the way. Also tons of empty areas? Like an empty, dusty closet with literally nothing in it that you could walk into, outside the huge fancy library. Nice to have a conversation log, but documents were handled in a strange way. Picking up letters, what you got to read was more like... Mac telling you what he read..? Seems like a roundabout way Alright but repetitive music. I appreciated that there were several ways to solve a few puzzles, but that's about it. Won't comment on the story because I found it difficult to get into it because of the dialogue, anyway. But it is in dire need of some humor.

I had nothing but trouble with this game unfortunately. After starting the game 5 or 6 times, I realized that conversation choices do, as well as don't matter. I followed one walkthrough as I couldn't figure out what I was trying to do after accessing the murder scene. The walkthrough was pretty awful too. -_- That being said, it was an interesting way to waste away the day dealing with glitches and interesting characters. I was sad that there wasn't a lot of relationship building with the characters, or getting to learn more about them. I also felt that the evidence could have been set up and described better. In the document view, I was stuck on 2 documents and it wouldn't let me look at any of the others. I like the direction they went with Still Life 1/2 much better. Gus was cool, but I learned a lot more about him in Still Life than I did in Post Mortem.

4/5 is probably a little high but I like to much of what this game wants to be, For me it was a fun and interesting trip down the history of gaming. In my opinion it had some realy great mechanic ideas which I would love to see in modern games just better executed. For example I realy liked the sketch of a person you create based of the informations you got of conversations. This was super neat and made me feel like I was realy investigating. I also like that it wasn't a Point and Click adventure. The whole game would have worked as one, I'm not the biggest fan of how point and click games feel with very few exceptions. This made me enjoy the game more. Post Mortems Sequels the Still Life Series intrigue me, but I never finished the first one because of the point and click gameplay. The ending of the story didn't work for me tho I wished it would have ended more down to earth. I can recommend playing this out of interest for old games and interest in mystery. I also recommend having a guide open, so the game wont frustrate you, This could kill the experience for you. I found a guide which gave me several Hints before revealing the solution, this was the perfect solution for me.

What on earth??? Why give me options if they're not options? A choice is not a choice if I HAVE to choose it. The charactors are well....uninteresting. The dialogue is bad, the voice acting is bad and the conversations are unrealistic. The game reveals plot narritives during conversations that you haven't even uncovered yet. Wouldn't waste your time, I'm glad I got this on a random game lottery for a few dollars as this is not worth it.