Casebook 1899 - The Leipzig Murders

(Follow [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/42150626-Jarl's-Game-Treasury/]my curator[/url] for more reviews like this) I don't like giving negative reviews to small indie games from niche genres, but sadly in this case I have to. Usually I try to see the positives and recommend a game even if it has major drawbacks (see my review of [url=https://steamcommunity.com/id/jarlfrank/recommended/25600?snr=1_5_9__402]Eschalon Book One[/url]), but this game's final chapter drops the ball so hard it ruins everything that came before. As a satisfying crime investigation game, which it promises to be, it fails utterly and completely. Therefore I cannot recommend it. This is sad, because it starts out with so much promise and has a very interesting setting. You play a detective in Leipzig, a major city of the German Empire, in 1899. I'm German myself and love the 19th century so this is a great setting. While not the best representation of the era I've ever seen, it's solid enough, leading you to some historic landmarks like the theater and the railway station, and giving you a nice window into the different social classes of the time. The art is a bit amateurish compared to other pi…

A well illustrated point and click adventure that unravels towards the end It's hard to describe - as a point and click where you solve puzzles and speak with characters, it works and is a great way to spend an afternoon, but the way it's marketed makes it sound like a self guided mystery where you make your own deductions (for example, like the more recent Sherlock Holmes games by Frogware), which it really isn't (the game continues regardless of your choice and there's no test of deductive ability)

I enjoyed playing this indie game, and some parts I loved. The dialogue was great and I liked the deduction system, and the graphics. The characters were good too. I found some puzzles to be very obscure and found this to be frustrating.

Overall I give this a neutral review, leaning toward not recommending. Pros and Cons: + The setting is interesting (- but completely irrelevant to the story or cases). + Graphics are very nice for the style it goes for (- but make it difficult to pick out areas of interest when pixel hunting) + The voice acting is good and the sound effects are nice. I especially liked the little chuckle the detective does which occasionally humorously matches with whatever you're examining. + The deductions system is pretty cool (- but seriously underbaked and occasionally just plain confusing) - The puzzles aren't explained well and have very little contextual relevance to the cases at hand. - Solving cases with multiple solutions requires a lot of faffing about in the notebook - The story is rather bizarre and unsatisfying. I had to resort to a guide because there was what I would call instances of moon-logic. I played the demo when it came out and I enjoyed the first case so much I purchased the game, but if you liked the demo, maybe you can save yourself some money and stop there.

Casebook 1899 - The Leipzig Murders is an excellent murder mystery point and click adventure game. It's got very good voice acting, beautiful graphics and clever puzzles. The voice acting is only available in German, but there are subtitles available in English and Italian, if you are not fluent in German.

The game starts off decently enough, but gradually becomes weaker, and is very weak by the last chapter. The puzzles in the last chapter are very contrived: You're in an office and you can't reach a paper, despite various furniture around that you could move and climb up onto; you're asking questions from a couple of children but they don't believe you're a police officer ("that badge might be fake") unless you can solve a math riddle (also you [spoiler]steal their dog[/spoiler] and they don't care/notice???); [spoiler]the "random" contents of every actor's locker at a local theater was perfectly preserved, because these contents are referenced in a published book which then acts like a map to find a specific location in Germany[/spoiler]. It feels like the author just ran out of ideas and just placed puzzles to give the player something to do, rather than because it would have made sense narratively. Otherwise, the first few cases are solid, but not outstanding. The puzzles made sense, the characters were believable, etc. Some of the dialog text was split up in a way that led to something akin Garden-path sentence, where you'd think the sentence ends earlier than it actually doe…