Retro Mystery Club Vol.1: The Ise-Shima Case

One of my pet peeves is that people keep calling old stuff retro. Retro doesn't mean old, it means emulating something that might be old and certainly is from a previous era, generation and whatnot. Retro Mystery Club (vol 1) does many things right, one of them being using the word retro correctly, as it imitates, with some (but not that many) quality of life features added on top, those now vintage games in the Famicom Detective Club series. It says so on the summary, and it does show on every aspect of its art direction, from the UI to the character sprites, the music tracks and the sound effects. It all comes together to offer a very authentic experience from a long gone era. The question would be if this first volume, The Ise-Shima Case, manages to stand on its own or it nostalgia is doing some heavy lifting. I would say that Happymeal and Undercoders have managed to write an engaging mystery with just as engaging characters and relationships. We're shown a layered, complicated web of social intricancies that involve what, at the end of the day, are people doing what people do: be emotional, messy and their best, even if their best is not *the best*, so to speak. Families tha…

I'm going to have to give this a negative review because the game's achievements do not unlock and haven't been unlocking since I purchased the game in March 2025. Please fix this!

detective games are so cool i wish japan was real

[b]Retro Mystery Club Vol.1: The Ise-Shima Case[/b] is practically made for fans of The Portopia Serial Murder Case, The Okhotsk Disappearance and Famicom Detective Club games. It's unapologetic in its presentation, too. Limited colour palette, low pixel count character sprites, limited polyphony soundtrack and menu system practically lifted from the PC88 version of Portopia. The synopsis of the game sounds promising to all detective game fans: there's a murder in a strange circumstance, and we need to travel to the countryside to try and solve it. Unfortunately, the investigation didn't quite grab me as much as the progenitor of this game did. The pacing seems a little off, at least from my point of view. I found the core mystery is not quite as interesting as I would like. The investigation (which took a little less than two in-game weeks) can feel a little tedious, and the progress of the case seems to take a rather glacial turn around the mid-point of the game. Of course, there's an argument to be made that this is just the true nature of police work, but I was expecting more dramatic turns, or perhaps a little finesse from a video game. Still, the pace finally picked up for…

Very fun if you like NES-style adventure games. Great artwork, simple but effective sounds and music, and a surprisingly twisty story with fun characters. I found a few unfortunate typos, but nothing that took me out of the game. Worked well with my Bluetooth 8BitDo controller. On to the sequel—and hopefully more volumes to come!

Tightly-plotted, a lot of fun to play. And makes me hungry. I love the attention to food in these games.