Gumshoe Detective Agency: The First Case

I love the concept, but oh my GOD the UI is unbearable. Closing a window closes all windows. You can't move windows. Back-button in the browser doesn't send you 1 page back, if you followed links: it sends you to homepage. I can't save the page I opened in a browser: the game decides which pieces of information are "evidence" that can be pinned on the board. And there's no way to access already found pages! The windows where you have to enter something are reset when you reopen, and you have to close and open again because you can't move windows to the back/foreground. The 1990s computer systems the devs are trying to emulate weren't half as bad as this!

I'm sure I don't have anything to say that hasn't already been said by all the other reviewers, but I'll post a review anyway to support the creator. :) This game feels like a good first draft at a Roottrees Are Dead style game. The internet search engine is always a fun mechanic and I like searching through webpages for the clues I need to solve the case, but the way it's been implemented here is very rudimentary compared to the Roottrees system. I hate to compare Gumshoe Detective Agency so heavily to a different game, but many people who might play this will almost certainly have played Roottrees first. So - having played Roottrees myself, a lot of the quality of life features that made the internet search mechanic fun and easy to use were very obviously absent from Gumshoe. Roottrees had a history you could use to quickly backtrack through the pages you'd visited, and the notebook included links for passages you'd highlighted so you could go back and see the passage in context. Not so with Gumshoe; there's no history, and navigating away from the internet browser to look at the case file or other evidence resets your progress back to the search engine when you come back. Appa…

If you're coming here after playing the Roottrees are Dead - or Emily is Away...you will be so disappointed. I bought this on sale for $9 and finished it in a little over 2 hours, the main reason it took that long was because of one puzzle that I didn't cheat on that was massively hard for no reason. My criticism comes from the story line - even at the end of the game, I didn't really fully understand the entire plot - it has a lot of holes in it and there's not really a lot of clues to bring the story line together, you're made to fully make up a connection on your own - which is very easy to miss minor clues for. I feel that $9 was massively overpriced for the value of this game - skip this one unless it's less than $4 or so. I do hope that in the future the writing and storyline is a bit better, this could be a fun series someday!

I really enjoyed this game! It scratched some of the itch I've had since playing Roottrees, Hypnospace Outlaw, and Type Help, though it was a shorter experience. The mystery itself was pretty straightforward so I didn't get hung up on any one puzzle for long, it was a nice breezy game to knock out with a cup of coffee on my morning off. For future titles, having resizable windows and a search history function would help a lot but with my handwritten notes I didn't struggle with the UI. Also maybe options to turn off the clicking sound effect, I didn't realize how often I ambiently click on nothing until I had to hear it in the game audio.

This game was so fun! I felt like I was back in the 90s playing a Nancy Drew or Missing Case Files game: the music, the clues, the puzzles. The puzzles were challenging but always solvable, the graphics were great, there was humor--overall, a great game to play, and I recommend it.

Fun game for those who like solving crimes/mysteries. But for the price it's very short, less than 2 hours of playtime for me. I would give it a strong recommendation at a lower price point, but it's a mild one as is.