Oniria Crimes

I'll be brief. - Game's intro is a narrative mess that raises more questions than it answers. - Detective work consists for about 90% of just clicking on objects and then waiting for two characters to stop talking so you can keep playing. - Said dialogues often contain lengthy exposition dumps, featuring dozens of names, factions, locations and events that you can't possible keep track of and that are not relevant to the case. - Needlessly obtuse puzzles. The puzzle box in Case 2 is a prime example of how not to design puzzles. - The player is never informed that crime scenes can be rotated. I didn't learn this until I saw it in the game's only guide after I'd already given up on playing the rest of it. That really was the final nail in the coffin.

Pros - The art-style is nice - The dialog and story are entertaining. Lot of world building going on. All very interesting but its kind of information overload. - Controls are decent, nothing to complain about. Entirely playable with mouse. Cons - The game offers wonderful world building, but so much information/locations/names etc is thrown at you with no index to refer back to. - The puzzles are not fun and at best can come down to guessing and at worst will not work at all. Here are some examples. There is a particular puzzle in case 3 that requires you to match the emblem of each guild. As far as I can see based on guides this is just complete guess work of matching a vague logo to a name and looking at the solution I don't know how anyone solved this as a handful of the emblems are not clear at all what they are portraying. Also in case 3 it requires you to guess and draw out the logo of a particular guild. In case 4 there is a QR code on a door. I figured after a few minutes that maybe your just meant to scan the QR code well I tried several times to scan the QR code with my android phone but all that was revealed was an asterisk. So I figured that was probably silly…

A very recommended hidden gem for fans of puzzle games, who do not mind going on extended pixel hunts. A detective game in a dream world, where every item doubles as a witness. What can that potted plant, this suitcase or the stairs tell you about the crime? Are you willing to get completely lost in a library with about 700 individual books? Leave Wakeland behind and dream yourself into a world, that leaves so, so much room (and backstory) for more to hopefully come one day.

Honestly ready to drop this game right on the first case. I've collected all of the clues and testimonies, and it's still entirely unclear what in the world happened. I basically have to guess the outcome over and over again until I get it right by trial and error, and that is terrible writing and design. Speaking of terrible writing, this game is constantly throwing out references to other things left and right like it's the Darkside Detective, and I hate that game. It's not as bad as that, but I still found the whole gimmick of talking to objects in the crime scene to be not funny and ultimately annoying to gameplay as your characters have to comment on every little thing. The only thing I liked was ironically the number puzzle to open the safe. Usually, I don't care for adventure game puzzles in detective games because it's just kind of unnecessary when intuiting what happened during the crime should be interesting enough on its own. However, this one was something I could actually piece together through context which is more than I can say for the actual crime. Don't bother with this.

I really wanted to like this game, but it's so damn buggy that I can't progress past case 2, even though I have a perfect score!

I enjoyed it! Couldn't believe my eyes when I saw a reference to Lumbanico the cubic planet, one of my favourite books as a kid! I can see why people in other reviews find the game repetitive with all the clicking, but the game is well written and doesn't feel like a chore at all. Even the library case was fun with all the lore. Very fun!