The Case of the Worst Day Ever

A bizarrely frustrating game. Very rocky difficulty curve, especially near the end, as you need to make more and more assumptions of varying eye-rolling levels of soundness. Last levels especially feel like an absolute chore. It is worth noting that the game itself plays very little like Case of the Golden Idol, it's mostly just logic puzzles. The surrounding presentation is worse: navigating around spaces is extremely clunky, reviewing multiple pieces of evidence is frequently impossible (including notes, where you cannot review evidence while writing them), writing feels painfully forced in a way that the games this is inspired by are able to present more naturally, Kevin Macleod music that doesn't loop right, and a very ugly art style.

Developers delivered on "deceptively difficult" but a lot of that was because it didn't look difficult at all. When your expectations are cozy game slop it doesn't take much to earn that label. Another reviewer mentioned this but it bears repeating, Worst Day leans far too heavily into SAT questions that insult your willingness to suspend disbelief. Are you for real telling me that the order that kids were marching across a stage was written out as "a zebra went last… no cheetahs went before or after each other… colin was fourth…"?? Or that a kennel would make up their own names for dogs and use that to assign medication?? It feels like the developers gave up on actually constructing mysteries after the midway point and just passed the buck to the SAT prep manual. The last half's "difficulty" is almost entirely the quantity of extended logic chains set up to identify a dozen people at a time. I was able to solve the underlying mystery long before I put together who everyone was (or what cakes they made, or what costume they wore) which made slogging through identifying them even more tedious. Another really annoying bit of tedium (that's our buzzword for this game now), there ar…

Highly recommend! Cute logic puzzle game

Very cute detective style game if you're into that whole Golden Idol, Obra Din thang but want something a bit more gentle and cozy. Looks gorgeous. Puzzles are fun (and kind of hard but I suck at this genre so take that with a grain of salt). Five hours well spent!

Humorous and challenging - very fun and highly recommend.

Great deduction game. The puzzle design relies more on deduction "if x, then y" puzzles than its contemporaries, like where you have to figure out which person sat where using a list of statements, but there's enough lateral clues scattered throughout to feel like a proper detective game. The red herrings are super well done, seemingly true in the moment, but clearly false in retrospect. For flaws, the story is kinda thin. For a game all about figuring out the who/what/where the individual cases are all more or less standalone and don't really build to anything. That said, some of the individual cases are compelling, it's more a missed opportunity. That's really minor though, the puzzle design is really great here and despite struggling at times, I never felt any frustration (except maybe case 9 lol). It's some on the best pure detective gameplay I've seen.