Dr. Doyle & The Mystery Of The Cloche Hat

Appearances can be decieving. For all its rough edges this is an unexpectedly deep point-and-click adventure game, designed in the older style. That is, if you can't connect the clues together in your own mind then chances are you'll be stuck. This approach by the developers is both a blessing and a curse. When playing Dr. Doyle one realizes how streamlined other adventure games have become: hotspots and inventory are overly specific in their intent; without even having to think the player often knows that to do. Not so with Dr. Doyle. Hotspots are deliberately vague in their meaning, and they don't reveal useful information...unless the player can deduce the correct topic to use with it. Topics are what the game uses in place of inventory, and the difficulty comes from the fact that they're initially abstract. Exhausting every available topic onto every available hotspot doesn't always work, because topics must be cultivated and informed over time, and often in a certain order of deductive reasoning. In fact, the player can even cultivate misinformed topics, unknowingly leading to incorrect conclusions! The game's strength is that it forces the player to intuit the clues themsel…

This is a pretty enjoyable short-ish game. It's chief virtue comes through how it more or less challenges the player to solve the mystery. It plays like a point and click adventure game, but your inventory consists not of wacky items but rather of conversation/investigation topics. Each of these topics can be used on people or objects in any given location. You have to think about how the elements of the crime relate to one another and, therefore, who needs to be asked about what. And then by the end, it's up to you to be certain whodunnit. It's genuinely pretty compelling. And it's really quite rare in digital medium. The only other GOOD games I can think of that attempt something like this are Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments and Shinrai I also enjoyed the soundtrack, which added a good bit of atmosphere to the proceedings and helped me to look past some of the art/mechanical gameplay- which felt just a tad short of the professionalism you might expect from wadjeteye or daedalic. If I have a criticism, it's that the mystery itself is just a tad simple and owes more to Sherlock Holmes (the investigator's name is Doyle) than it does to Agatha Christie. This means …

A very fun game that deserves to be more widely known. This is quite a challenging who-done-it, with some clever twists in the tale. If you enjoy games that do the detective genre well, I highly recommend this title. One tip: Choose your handling of each witness carefully. The right approach will unlock their tongues when the wrong start to a conversation can handicap your future progress. I for one would love to play another 'Dr Doyle' title :)

Please make a sequel!!

Don't bother. The game is unplayable, it has a bug and suddentdly you can't keep playing. Restarted/reloaded many times to have the same think happening again and again.

frustrating in parts, but not bad