Serviceable Point&Click Adventure
Song of Farca is an adventure game in a cyberpunk setting. The story follows a private investigator, Isabella Song, under house arrest in the city of Farca as the tensions between the citizens and the corporations are rising. The main character’s personality and manner of speech are predetermined, and might be off-putting. She, a gay cis immigrant woman, uses homophobic slurs, casually threatens, blackmails, and sends a random person to prison without conclusive evidence. Additionally, the police are presented as well-meaning but powerless, while the protesters are universally sociopathic. Finally, the game briefly raises the topic of domestic violence without offering a resolution or providing agency to the survivor. On the other hand, the setting itself features a diverse cast of characters, though it was hard to notice differences in the manner of speech, and the dialogues are not voiced.
As typical for adventure games, many dialogues are linear or the options are meaningless, making some of the story-significant choices hard to notice. The game structure is comfortable - the cases are clearly separated and mostly self-contained.
There are several types of puzzles - finding the information in a location from a top-down view, with all interactive objects, clues, and characters clearly marked and dialogue-based "conclusions" - combining two pieces of information into an argument to convince an NPC. At the beginning, there are no direct penalties for failing and retrying puzzles or time limits, but from mid-game and onward failing some of the puzzles affects the story, and it is not clearly communicated which of them allow retries.
There are no hotkeys, the game uses auto-saves, it is impossible to skip cutscenes, actual choices and consequences are unmarked. On a positive note, the objective and the number of clues to discover is shown and it is possible to reset a location to its original state. Also there are several hints for the puzzles.
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