Detective Dotson

I enjoyed this game! I actually met the dev who made this game at GDC in 2024, and he was really nice. You could tell he put a lot of effort into crafting a meaningful and unique story. I got to playtest the game. The finished game is a great extension of my original playtest. I loved the dialogue, storylines, and mystery. It felt a bit like a game of Clue or an escape room, but with comedy, complexity, and charm. Great for people who love puzzle games with a twist of adventure stirred in!

This is a good game, but don't buy it if you're looking for a detective game. Unfortunately most of this game is running around a platform-game style screen, buying items to trade for more money, so you can buy items to trade for clues. The only detective part of this is the end of each 'case' where you put all the clue cards in the right places on the board. I think a lot of people will enjoy this game, but as I bought it for it's 'detective' tag I can't recommend it as I'm really disappointed how little detective gameplay there is

This one was a bit of a disappointment for me. I’ve had it on my wish list forever and finally decided to try it out during the sale. I really gave it a fair chance, went through the whole thing and got all of the achievements. It’s pretty and the soundtrack is nice. Some of the mini games were also fun, although they were all basically optional. Otherwise, there’s really not much to it… you just kind of walk around and pick up items and then give them to people without really understanding exactly why you’re doing it. There is very little actual detective work in this game and the mysteries are always underwhelming considering you don’t ever get to know any of the characters. Did anybody else ever wonder whose the girl on the screen who gives the tutorial? It’s never explained, she’s just there. Also, it’s extremely short and there is no disclosure anywhere that only chapter one is out with more to come. Overall the games asking price is extremely steep for the gameplay you get. The scenery and soundtrack show its potential, but there’s a lot of work to be done to make the game worth playing.

I do adore the rich music and cultural ties... but the gameplay and story are very rough. The translation is frankly poor, and even if it was better, I'm not sure the story would be solid either. The translation is bad. Poor grammar and odd structure lead to things being either too cryptic or too obvious but also hard to format on the deduction screen. The deduction screen is very bad - while it tries to emulate the look and feel of a detective pinning things together on a corkboard with red string... its very unclear what is connected to what? The arrows that exist to clarify definitely pointed in the wrong direction a few times. The translation can make it more difficult, which lead me to exhaust all my hints because I did not want to deal with it. Even after playing through the entire available game (as of writing there is a part two teased), I don't know anything about 99% of the characters. We lean a bit about a few in the finale and some surface level info on Dotson himself... but that's really it. The finale looses a lot of luster when you are shown a character as an apparent plot twist, but the only time you see them is on... [spoiler] a single wanted poster that's easi…

As others have said, there's very little deduction in this game. The majority of the time is spent in a simple platformer, dodging occasional thrown refuse as you try to understand what you need to bribe someone with to get information from them, then go throw away refuse or do other fetch-quests to get the money to buy the thing to bribe the person to get the piece of information. Once you have all of the information, put it in a pretty straightforward grid. Full of fun culture, but not much gameplay.

The game has too many bugs, and also the gameplay isn't satisfactory. It has a good story, and I really loved that it supports an Xbox controller, but overall, I didn't like this product. Hopefully, they will improve chapter two.