In October last year, the first episode of the episodic crime noir adventure game The Detail creeped onto Steam. To ring in the new year, let’s get a torch and some rubber gloves and see what’s it’s all about.

Where the Dead Lie begins with a pleasingly Miller-esque exchange between two police officers and an unnerving child molester who has kidnapped a little girl. Once he is subdued, you have to interrogate him.

You are given the option of throwing the book at him at the risk of never finding the other girls he has kidnapped, or giving him a lenient sentence if he spills the beans. This sets the grim tone for the rest of The Detail.

The episode is mostly split between two protagonists. Reg is a weathered, disillusioned detective who sees a prostitute and is so tired about the state of the city and the depravity of its criminals. What I’m trying to communicate is that he’s practically a walking cliché. As a result, some of his lines of dialogue are absolutely cringe-worthy.

When the head of one of the town’s crime families turns up dead underneath an underpass, the police department are ready to write it off as a standard gangland murder. However, as evidence begins to unfold, Reg begins to sense that something more sinister is happening behind the scenes.

To investigate, they need a man on the inside. That’s where the second protagonist comes in. Joe is a reformed criminal who has settled down with the love of his life and started a family. Despite being completely reluctant to be involved in any criminal activity, the police force him out of his settled life to be their mole, putting his family at risk and potentially destroying the life he has managed to etch out for himself.

It’s hard to be on the side of the police in this scenario, although I’m certain that was the intention. To force Joe into colluding with them, they blackmail him with the threat of turning up at his apartment in order to drag up his past and disturb his family. In terms of creating likeable characters, this is a bit of an own goal on the developer’s part. I don’t think there was a single completely likeable character in the entire episode.

Being an episodic adventure game, the comparisons to the phenomenal Telltale games are inevitable. However, where as The Walking Dead was a game that attempted to create an interactive HBO series, The Detail attempts to create an interactive graphic novel.

The visuals consist mostly of comic strips with the occasional animated section, which sounds minimalistic but serves the concept well. The artwork is moody and gives the city an atmosphere of relentless misery, even if it is basically just Gotham minus Batman.

The Telltale comparisons come rushing back with the game’s mechanics. Like The Walking Dead, the player is occasionally forced into making difficult decisions without having the time to consider the consequences. Unfortunately, they failed to be really effective due to the fact that I really struggled to get invested in the story.

Perhaps if the decisions I made in Where the Dead Lie reverberate through-out the following episodes and result in branching story-lines, it’ll become more intriguing. As it stands, I don’t feel as if the choices I made had any major consequences. It hardly reached the emotional stress of the gutting ‘choose one of these people to die’ decisions of The Walking Dead.

Perhaps if the episode had some puzzles, it’d be more entertaining. There is an element of police investigation, with the player piecing together clues in order to draw conclusions, but thus far, my conclusions made absolutely no impact on the progression of the story.

It feels more like watching a detective attempt to solve a crime that actually being a detective. There is a point where Reg and his partner follow a lead to the house of a known criminal. They suspect he is guilty, but have no proof and no warrant.

In order to get into the house, Reg has to go into the backyard and look through the back window. He sees a rat and says something along the lines of “that’s our ticket into the house”, which confused me. Apparently, there’s a law that if the police suspect a pet is being mistreated, they can enter private property to help.

Clearly the rat is not a pet and I doubt it would hold up in court as a genuine reason to invade someone’s home. It’s a like a retro adventure game puzzle that solves itself. It might sound like a petty point to bring up, but it highlights The Detail’s problems. The protagonist basically tells the player that this is a clever idea and it’s how things are going to progress, and the player basically has to just nod and click on.

I may have been overly harsh with Where the Dead Lie, but that’s because there’s bags of promise on show but it fails to deliver. The soundtrack is positively lovely, and despite the clichés, there’s glimmers of a morally grey tale of corruption and brutality. Despite the lack of intuitive puzzles, there could be more emphasis on piecing together clues and choosing leads to follow. What I’m trying to say is that The Detail is a diamond in the rough, but at this point it’s 90% rough and only 10% diamond.

4/10

© 2015, zero1gaming.com. All rights reserved. On republishing this article your must provide a link to this original post