Emerald City Confidential™

Emerald City Confidential takes the colorful mythology of Oz and transforms it into a surprisingly effective detective mystery filled with corruption, secrets, political intrigue, and magical conspiracies. Developed by Wadjet Eye Games and published by Electronic Arts, it is a traditional point-and-click adventure built around investigation, dialogue, exploration, and puzzle solving. Instead of attempting to recreate the cheerful tone normally associated with Oz, the game imagines a more complicated version of the setting where familiar characters have moved on with their lives and the Emerald City has developed problems considerably darker than wicked witches and yellow brick roads. The player assumes the role of Petra, a private investigator whose latest case gradually becomes far more dangerous and important than expected. What begins as detective work develops into a broader mystery involving powerful individuals and hidden agendas. Petra is a fitting protagonist for this interpretation of Oz because she approaches its magical absurdities with the attitude of a hardened investigator. Her personality gives the adventure a noir flavor without turning the entire experience into a…

nice

Loved it as a kid and love it now. Unlike other attempts at adapting the famous book and far more famous original film, this really relaly pulls of a new look and feel for the world. Clearly the writers loved the entire book series because there are a sort of insane amount of niche characters and plotlines no average person would know of. Fun story, fun characters, fun world. Just great stuff

What a sweet game this was to play in five sittings. WEG never disappoints, ECC happened to elude me ever since I first played it over a decade ago. And one does not need to be well-versed in Oz lore to enjoy this. I'm proof of that, and so is my cat.

Emerald City Confidential feels like a weird midpoint in the evolution of adventure games. Like that middle guy in the human evolution chart that's standing on two feet but still slouches and has hair everywhere. It abandons eclectic, complex inventory puzzles for a mostly small selection of items that are frequently reused. While it has a lot of the quirky lighthearted humor of earlier adventure games the noir theme moves it more towards the dramatic, complex plots later adventure games would make their stock in trade. I don't mean any of that as negative, it's a good adventure game. Fun characters and an interesting if somewhat small world make for a pleasant experience. It's also not very long so it doesn't have time to wear out its welcome. Puzzles are mostly sensible and there are only like two puzzles that made me use the hint system. Also, this game has very good hint system, each puzzles has several hints of increasing clarification and I only ever needed the top level hint which reflects good puzzle and hint design. It ran fine for me out of the box, which is always welcome for games of this age. Some people have reported some stutters or visual breakdowns but I had no…

Fun little whodunnit with the characters of Oz (after the fact). corruption, magic, police brutality and popping (knowlege) pills. Interesting. it's linear but plays fine.