Excellent game! Interesting characters, Awesome, even relaxing, voice acting, very unique, good looking design. Well crafted mystery, this is an excellent game, down to, and including, the very end.
The visuals are superb.
All dialogue is voiced, and the voice acting is great.
I only remove a start because of the ending. It was slightly unsatifying. It felt a bit abrupt, and the ultimate motive didn't seem clear.
This game is missing 2 functions I look for in a Point-and-Click game:
(1) Your cursor changing shape when you hover over something you can click on.
(2) A button you can press that shows you everything on screen you can interact with.
You can LITERALLY click on any point of the scene, and you'll get flavor text, if only to tell you there's nothing there...which is annoying, and increases the amount of guesswork needed to find everything there is to interact with, so it makes pixel hunting both necessary and excruciating. Either that, or making you use a walkthrough.
In other words, they really didn't fix the problem from the first game.
The artwork, animation, music and voiceovers are all still very high quality.
I don't like what they changed Sally's character design to...
In the end, I wasn't able to guess the culprit, and rather think they came out of leftfield; their motives didn't make any sense, and were a REAL stupid reason to murder somebody...so I can't say I found the ending satisfactory.
I really enjoyed Detective Grimoire, which was a cheap and short and linear but stylistic little game for $6.99 base (which is often on sale for much much less). Here's the developer's second game, a bigger endeavor with a bigger price tag at $19.99 base. Is it indeed bigger and better? Well...no. This is stylistically an absolutely gorgeous game, with a lot of heart and well designed characters and animations, much like in the first game. The rooms are absolutely beautiful and I spent a lot of time soaking in each scene. Happily you can click almost anything unique-looking in a room and there will usually be unique dialogue for it. So the art is A+. Unfortunately the plot is completely lacking. When you transition from a small 'finger food' game to a bigger game with a bigger pricetag, there's an expectation for something more, some replayability, some plot intrigue that sticks in your mind, something. And this is where the linear aspect of this game and its predecessor Detective Grimoire really drags the experience down. If a game has player choice where you can 'fail' and achieve a bad ending by accusing the wrong person, then you are going to create your own engagement because you don't want to 'fail'! You're going to be poring over snippets of text and replaying conversations like you're with the NSA. But if a game is totally linear where no matter what the player chooses or thinks you are going to be funneled to the 1 predetermined ending, then player engagement is innately less so it HAS to have a stellar and thought-provoking plot. Unfortunately, this plot and the final reveals about the 'villains' and their motivations or lack thereof are so bizarre and poorly supported that the only thought it provoked in me was "what in the world was that." I enjoy this developer's work and can't wait for their next game, but I think it's clear that they would benefit from hiring better writers and/or focusing more on player choice.
Tangle Tower is definitely a GOTY-worthy game in my book, while I loved and enjoyed Detective Grimoire this game really took the breath out of me. They truly perfected everything from the previous game, continuing with high-quality art design, story and voice-acting.
It's a classic murder mystery with a kinda dysfunctional family and it brings my mind to an Agatha Christie novel despite Grimoire not being much of a Poirot. But it's also more than that, it's also uncovering the secrets of three families and the current family members staying in Tangle Tower. Each character is unique and has their own personality, which makes the game very enjoyable when interacting with them.
I can't express how much I enjoyed this game other than recommending it to everyone! It's a bonus if you played Detective Grimoire first, but it is not mandatory to do so. This game is more of a stand-alone sequel than anything. I can't wait for the third upcoming one!