Wolf Peak: The Case of Ruth Choi

there's no real logging of context found about many pieces of evidence (e.g. location found) which makes it hard to piece things together for reasons of needing to tediously track down old information. because items can't be arranged on the board and you can't connect them to each other, that makes this central aspect of the game very annoying and unhelpful. also, i may have missed a critical piece of evidence, but i found the real solution to be less narratively satisfying than pretty much any other possibility, and less evidence-supported than some other possibilities (although it is at least usually clear enough when some evidence is a red herring). as a more minor annoyance, each piece of evidence has a limited number of tests that can be run on them, and two of the tests read fairly ambiguously which may result in tests being wasted when figuring out the system.

Wolf Peak: The Case of Ruth Choi is an UNDERRATED game. Maybe it's due to lack of marketing, but I have no idea how this game isn't more popular. When you look up investigation / mystery games on reddit you'll find the same old: Roottrees, Painscreek, CaseCracker, The Operator, etc. Somehow, The Case of Ruth Choi is not on those lists. In my opinion, this game is for the elite. The top 5% that are well versed in case file games and know how to play detective. There is no hand-holding. You're plopped in an office located at the police station, told everything you need is in the room and you have a forensic specialist on speed dial for physical evidence needs. That's it. With that said, this game is hard. Everyone has a motive. However, if you're willing to whip out your notebook and really get to the bottom of it - the answer IS there. It just takes a lot of critical thinking and attention to detail. One small note - make sure you check everything. Click on everything. Take the time to explore. I had no idea there were two small filing cabinets located in the middle of the room until about half way through the game. 10/10. I hope the developers have plans to create more cas…

As a lover of The Painscreek Killings, The Roottrees are Dead, and These Beds We Made, big yes! I really enjoyed this. I admit that I ended up needing to use a guide at the end because despite having a lead suspect, there was a lot of overlapping/ambiguous evidence. I think that might have been mitigated had the "crazy wall" (which was very cool to have!) were more customizable in terms of dragging things around to better lay out the evidence for oneself visually to process. There were some small nitpicks too (grammar and spell-check would have been wise). All in all, despite the ending feeling a bit flat to me, the gameplay itself and the hunt were a ton of fun and definitely scratched the itch that my other favorites have left me constantly trying to get at.

Really engaging game! I loved digging into all the documents and testing evidence and really felt all the characters had interesting motives/secrets to piece together. That said, I did find the system of attaching evidence and documents on the board cumbersome and the ending itself not entirely satisfying. I would love to see more games in this vain, I think the writing and tone was really well executed and some QoL and honing of the mechanics could make for an all-time great "thinky" game.

A very strong detective game that lets you do the same sort of investigating as other great entries in the genre, like The Roottrees Are Dead. You are the investigator on the case of Ruth Choi's murder. You're popped into a room with all the collected evidence, suspect interviews, case notes, warrants, and anything else relevant to the case. You've got a strong list of suspects, now you just have to sift through all the evidence and figure out who killed Ruth Choi! There were a few things that bugged me about the game, like the lack of more specific audio settings. While you can turn off the clock sounds, I couldn't find a place to change the overall volume mixing, which was a bit annoying, but since the audio wasn't super essential for the gameplay, I didn't find it to be an insurmountable obstacle. [spoiler] Though, the voice acting that was just repetitions of short sounds or words got to be quite annoying; I do wish there was a choice to turn those off as well. [/spoiler] I also wish there was some sort of in-game option for taking notes. The ability to write stuff down or take notes about inconsistencies would've helped a lot with making sense of what was going on, a…

It is worth playing, but it has some problems, as it is supposed to be a hyper realistic police procedural. It is apparent that the devs and/or the editor were not from the United States as there are non-US spellings and words used, and all types of politics are just a bit off from the US's reality (sexual, age-based, racial, small-town life, gun). In terms of the actual mystery, metaphorical chest-high walls are used (e.g., you are only allowed to suspect certain people for no clear reason; you cannot check using new interviews or research whether in retrospect it appeared that someone wasn't telling the truth back in the day; also, all the evidence is in a pile with very little indication of what location it came from; also, did no one demand their stuff back after all this time?; and you have to communicate with the crime lab basically by playing a game of telephone as the requests are very poorly defined; also, apparently, god came down and gifted us a suspect profile which is infallible and not created within the game's narrative). And, of course, there are a lot of truly implausible coincidences. But, the gameplay is fun. You just poke around in the evidence until you've made…