Card Detective

An interesting detective game with a deckbuilding twist where you use cards to break through to others and find the truth. The game takes a few hours to finish and a bit longer to complete all the side stories and get all achievements. The gameplay mechanic was pretty interesting and I liked how the strategies changed as time progressed. At the start, brute forcing is much easier than analysis because of the card availability in the starting deck. As you complete more side stories, you unlock more cards you can add to your deck. As difficulty increases, modifiers and health are added to opponent cards which makes it much harder to brute force and I found analysis to be easier. That being said, both brute force and analysis are viable methods which adds a bit of variety and lets you play the way you want to, with each method presenting different challenges. (Side note: I noticed that the analysis symbols don't change when you fail and restart, so you really can't beat a level, just record the symbols and go in with the prior knowledge.) The game is quite easy and as long as you build an alright deck it shouldn't be too hard. Story wise, the narrative was quite interesting as ther…

I tried really hard to justify giving this game a positive review, because I want to encourage indie devs to make more games. Unfortunately, in this case, it seems like this game is gonna be a case study in the importance of polish and proper translation. So for the new folks thinking of buying this game, you play as a reporter investigating an incident at a construction site. Cutscenes are in a "comic book"-style, and gameplay consists of the deck-building and the interview card game. There's also a cafe screen, which functions as a menu for side-interviews or proceeding with the main story. Here's the negative parts: * Technical issues. The game is really slow & unresponsive at times. I'll click on the New Game button, and nothing happens for several seconds. Anecdotally, it tends to happen when the game language is set to English for me. Your mileage may vary. The game just has a really aggressive autosave system that just puts you right back where you left off. When I shutdown the game in the middle of a cutscene because I want to change language settings, upon restarting, the game bypasses the main menu and goes right back in the middle of that same cutscene. And you…

makes no sense

GAMEPLAY 7/10 Card Detective is a card battle game set in a comic book style where you can build your own deck as you see fit, even adjusting it from one battle to the next. The battle setting is unique in that you are using cards to break down the mental defenses of characters you are interviewing in an attempt to determine if they are lying or telling the truth. There’s about 5-8 hours of content here but unfortunately not a lot of replayability other than if you want to try a couple of different deck builds. NARRATIVE 7/10 In the story you play a reporter who’s investigating an accident at a construction site and must interview both witnesses and other characters to determine what happened. Is there more here than meets the eye? Is there a cover up? Was the construction company negligent? True to its comic book style character’s personalities are exaggerated and over-the-top which you may find charmingly-cheesy depending on your tastes. Neither the story nor the characters are especially nuanced and anyone with a bit of history with narratives will see through certain characters almost immediately. GRAPHICS 7/10 I loved the realistic comic art style the devs chose to dri…

[i] My Experience [/i] I'm always interested when developers combine deckbuilding with a new theme I haven't seen before. In 2021, developers Klabater & Juggler Games combined deckbuilding with managing a traveling circus troupe to create [b]The Amazing American Circus[/b], which I found to be a lot of fun. Developer MuccyGames here combines deckbuilding with interrogation from a news reporter to create [b]Card Detective[/b], and again I had a good time. However, I can't say that I totally understood the story. Some aspects of the original Chinese didn't translate particularly well to English. There were a lot of references to the "masters" of various characters, and the meaning of this word here wasn't entirely clear to me. Is "master" referring to someone's boss at work? A mentor? A parent? The poor translation affects the gameplay to a small degree as well - everything related to your discard pile uses odd terminology. At the same time, I was able to understand the interrogation mechanics well enough. You're given two ways to obtain each fact you're looking for. You can either "brute force" your way through someone's defenses, or correctly guess or deduce a series of X's and …

Great bang for your buck. A unique deck building system that lets you play multiple ways (including a 'find the lie' mini-game where you mostly ignore the other features, which is how I ended up playing by the end). The card system has some real issues- about halfway through, when you're trying to deduce statements, the clues become pointless, as unlocking all of the defenses will only clarify that 'this will have both X's and O's.' And at one point you have to determine that the line 'people have to eat' is a lie? And the UI is not well designed for the details the game wants to show you ( not being able to see full statements, so many effects on defenses that you just kind of have to memorize what they are, or mouse over them every single time). All that said, there's still a lot of love here. A lot of great comic art styled images, an ok story/mystery that loses some of the nuance through the translation. Overall, it's a decent 5 hours at a good price.