Mr Investigator

I’m going to say a lot but you should know from the start that Mr. Investigator, despite its awful name and lackluster steam store page, is a hard Very Much Recommend with a rare 17/10 rating. Also, I played this on a steam deck despite it not being at all appropriate to play on a steam deck, and I had a great time for the most part. I just made one of the back buttons a keyboard toggle and another one a magnifier toggle and I was good to go. I used the touch pad and there a little bit of input lag when you are in menu screens but it’s not at all noticeable in game. Besides, you’ll spend most of your time staring unblinking at objects willing them to become a clue and watching them not become a clue. With one exception, this developer has an incredible talent for investigation puzzle design. I have not seen this much variety and clever use of limited mechanics in many solo dev games (including solo dev games that I love!). Woowee, I can’t say a lot without spoiling it, but this game has a lot of fun shenanigans. It’s crazy to me that one person put this all together. Mr. Investigator also very much delivers on the promise of “no hand-holding.” You can turn off hints and ther…

What a wonderful and unique take on the "Obra Dinn/Golden Idol" deduction type game. This game has you going through several different vignettes to figure out what happened. I can tell you that most of the puzzles are unique and interesting. With the kinds of solutions that you feel like you should have gotten all along. All wrapped in a very heartfelt story. I'm looking forward to anything else coming from this dev as they definitely have the right mindset for the kind of deductive puzzle creation.

A key mechanic in this game is viewing this house at different times and different days. [spoiler]Realising that some doors are open on some days and not on others, and jumping between them to access rooms not otherwise accessible is a key thing to realise. However, with this mechanic, *where* you end up seems to lag behind you and you can end up either in a door or on the opposite side of a door you want to be on - even after walking all the way into the opposite side of a room from the door, and so you need to transport back and forth to somehow make this janky mechanic work for you. This is made worse by the same audio clip playing whenever you open the investigation opens on a day you've transported to, regardless of how many times you've visited it, which you then need to skip past in order to transport back and try again.[/spoiler] I eventually got so frustrated with this and, on top of me not clicking with the puzzles and finding them obtuse, that I rage quit the game. I appreciate what the developer was trying to do here and I think there's some merit to it, but either this game, or future games, need a lot more polish to smooth out the game experience.

If you like Obra Dinn, this is a great way to satiate that thirst of investigation. I havent finished it yet but it seems like a short game. There are some glitches when you fill the clues that need to be adressed but everything else work really well

Good if you like games, scene investigator. Its a bit rough around the edges, i did encouter quite a few bugs, some of which also interferred with gameplay. And one puzzle was really unsatisfying to solve. But the overall presentation and vibes were really well made. With a few touchups and technical polish a great entry in the deduction game genre.

I really wanted to like this, a proper deductive reasoning game where you investigate a single crime over a series of days. Feels similar to Scene Investigators, but isn't as good. Mr Investigator is unfortunately lacking in polish and filled with immersion-breaking bugs. It's by no means a terrible game, and maybe worth picking up if you've exhausted all the other options. However, I find it difficult to recommend in its current state. It's also very short.