Chinatown Detective Agency

I just love the artstyle and concept: the need to do research out of game gave me solid Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego“ flashbacks - in the most positive way. Would be 5* if you had the ability to safe while inside a case.

‘Chinatown Detective Agency’ is a detective point-and-click adventure game with an engaging story, with plenty of interesting cases to solve. After a protracted tutorial, you get to choose one of 3 clients, each of whom will temporarily steer the story into a new direction, with different sets of puzzles. Narratively, this is where ‘CDA’ is most fun. Sadly, all branches return to a singular point in the main story. From that point on, the only difference is the supporting cast. Still, I really enjoyed how ‘CDA’ incorporated the ethnic diversity, dialects, cultures, and societal issues of Singapore, the game’s setting, into the story. Tossing in some globetrotting à la ‘Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?’ made the adventure grander. I really liked the game sharing a brief history (and expanded fictional future history) of each city and neighbourhood you visit. I like ‘CDA’, but I don’t love it. I found it an overly ambitious game that lacks polish. Some locations and mechanics felt underused or unnecessary, and almost all of the game’s puzzles require you to alt-tab out of the game so you can search the Internet for clues or solve the problems. It’s a neat idea, but pulling players away from the game’s environment too much isn’t. Plus, the version I played (1.0.17) was buggy. There were mismatches between subtitles and spoken dialogues, missing voice acting in parts, uneven sound levels, missing city description, inappropriate sound loops, grammatical and spelling errors, and so on. The worst part of ‘CDA’ is that you can only save at the end of a case, so quitting mid-case or failing means starting a case from the beginning. In spite of its obvious flaws, ‘CDA’ is still a game worth playing because the good parts truly outshine the bad. It might have missed the bullseye, but not by so much that it becomes a bad game. Overall, ‘CDA’ is a fun detective adventure game that tests your mental prowess, or at the very least, search engine skills.

special points for being based in Singapura, a wonderful island with great people. Detective game fans will lap it up. Just watch out -you can't savegame for the first 30-40 mins so be sure to leave enough time in your first session

I love cyberpunk, I love thrilling detective stories, I love point & click adventures, I love pixel retro looks and I love playing such games on the big screen in the living room, together with my partner, who is also an adventure enthusiast. Since Technobabylon we have been waiting for a worthy game from this genre. Virtuaverse, released in the meantime, was unfortunately quite a disappointment (flat story and characters, no voice acting). We were therefore very much looking forward to Chinatown Dedective Agency... We haven't played the game very far and can't say much about the story yet. At least it looks promising. The graphics are nice and the music is good. Unfortunately, a few aspects that are important to us are bitter disappointments: - Voice acting is only present in a few scenes. Most of the time you have to go through silent and hard to read pixel dialogs. - The mouse cursor and many elements on the screen are very small and not adjustable. This makes the game lose a lot of atmosphere and it's not really playable on the living room screen (without voices and with too small fonts) unless you sit directly in front of the screen. Playing it together is therefore not possible/comfortable for us. Too bad.