Chinatown Detective Agency (2022)

I started out playing on Xbox and got to a point where it asked me to use an IRL search engine. I thought this was pretty unreasonable unless it was going to do its own fictional search engine or at least something in-game but no!

So I downloaded it for PC and kept playing until it wanted me to buy a ticket and take a flight... which I did. It said I had to wait because my flight was not for 3 hours, so I manually waited 3 hours and then it said I missed my flight.

It was at this point I quit the game and uninstalled it. WHO IS THIS GAME FOR?! I heard it compared to the old Carmen Sandiego games which I used to really enjoy. But in execution, this is NOT that!

Let me explain:

First I did a simple match game puzzle which is nothing special but fine. Then I had to google an answer and it was really idiotic. I understand in theory it is like doing research but because the game has been out more than one day, everything that comes up is just online guides FOR THE GAME!

Then I had to figure out a cipher but it felt really time-consuming and I knew what it wanted because I got the solution as story, so there was no puzzle. Figuring out the cipher seems like it would be the puzzling part but instead, it was given and I just had to do the busy work of transcribing. Seems backwards.

So when I follow all the busywork directions and try to move forward I end up missing a flight?! It feels like the "gameplay" is all the shitty parts and the puzzle stuff is all just skipped over as plot and given to you?!

I have put less than an hour into this and I am so annoyed for wasting even that much on this.

I started playing on Xbox but then it was like, "use the internet"... umm... this is an Xbox.

I then decided to play on PC, so I am going to download it there but I have not restarted it yet.

Anyway, I am still interested, but, I only heard it described as a new Carman Sandiego type and I used to love that game but you never had to google anything, everything you needed was in game... so not quite.

This game should have been a home run for me, and the first couple of hours really were promising. This is essentially a spiritual successor to the Carmen San Diego games, where all of the puzzles use real world factual information to inform their solutions. You’ll be tasked with things like identifying languages, figuring out cities based on historical or cultural clues, or decoding real code systems like Morse code.

This is great, but it all falls apart when the game presents to you puzzles whose solutions are just plain WRONG. Seriously; the Morse code decodes to a value that is something like “3852N01413” and the game demands that you input “352N01413E”. And it’s not like there was some missing step that would transform the first value into the second value — the game is very explicit, all you need to slash can do for this puzzle is decode the Morse code they show you.

Once the game broke my trust in that way, I was out. I should have been singing this game’s praises from the rooftops, because I am desperate for games like this, where real world information and research are the keys to the puzzles. Instead, all I can say is, steer clear of this game, which obviously had no QA or play testers, because it doesn’t respect you enough to not give you verifiably broken puzzles.