This is a fun adventure which doesn't take itself serious, with rather easy and logic puzzles, one great quality of life feature: clicking twice has our character run around real fast, the voice acting is very good and music fits the theme. Sadly the game is held back by some rather bad design decisions. Clicking on an item or set piece will have the detective say something about it. When there is no new information available after clicking on something the first time, deactivating it would have been a good choice. Instead one has to click on the skip button in the upper left corner of the screen, more than once, if there's more than one line of text being spoken. The skip button should be reserved for dialogs and interactive scenes, where one push on the button will skip the whole thing, not just one line to the next. It would also have helped to bind skip to a mouse-button, so the actuall button to press could vanish from the UI. When one item has to be used in the same scene, there should be no need to automatically place it into the inventory, opening it, dragging out and using it on a hotspot, place it somewhere and deactivate the item. This would have made the process of dousing the fire a straightforward process. Take the bottle, drag it over the fire, put it back. There are large animated character portraits displayed during mono-/dialogs, causing the actual characters and parts of a scene to vanish behind them. Why haven't they simply animated the lips on the actual characters and add a subtitle option? A settings button is displayed and the inventory on its left. Clicking on an item iniates a dialog which causes the inventory button to slide behind the settings button. Removing the settings button and only displaying the inventory would have been better. Let me reiterate: This is a good game, if not for the bad design decisions and unnecessary visual clutter, it could have been 5 stars straight so it's only a solid 3.
This review is based on the latest in-development version 0.5.0.3 and over 1000 hrs. playing the game. Looking for a game to relax with Dorfromantik looked promising but didn't deliver in the early stages of development. The RNG was a big problem, there was no UNDO button, it wasn't entirely clear how tiles fit together, and the placed tiles, fields first and foremost, didn't look good. These and several other changes and improvements have been made to this game and it's now close to perfection. Since this has been dealt with it is a true joy to play and truly relaxing. The RNG algorithm has been tweaked and it is now possible to solve challenges and set or beat a highscore. Colors of tiles have been altered and placed tiles look like they are fitting together. It's now in a stage in which i consider it a joy to fire the game up, relax and take my mind off of things. What's more is that developers were and are listening, they publish changelogs and keep continuing to support the game in a timely manner on GOG. If you are looking for a relaxing gaming experience this is the game for you. Be aware that this game can become very addictive so keep a clock on your desk otherwise it's 5 hours later before you know it.
