david.reviews: the game "The Painscreek Killings"

★★★☆: An interesting take on a walking simulator / detective game. It says up front that it's meant to emulate solving a real crime. As a result, there's remarkably little "game" like about it. You're exploring the town, finding evidence, and piecing together the timeline of everything that's happened in this town. There are no hints or objective guides, it's all up to you.The game itself is... slow? It's a lot of opening cabinets, most of which are empty. It's not an activity for everyone. There are definitely puzzles to be solved (matching keys & combinations to locks), but there's also a _lot_ of walking and fiddly cursor controls. The story is reasonable and was fun to experience as a piece of fiction you could experience in a self-directed order. Detective story wise it's a little weak, since if you keep following the clues, the game really spoon feeds you the answer. It's not the worst thing, but when it lets you "turn in" your answer at any time, I expected a little more rigor…