Do you have what it takes to be a private eye? To comb through clues and solve mysteries? Chinatown Detective Agency asks you to put your money where your mouth is.
Chinatown Detective Agency
Developer: Humble Games
Platform: PC, Switch
Monster Vine provided a Steam code for review
Set in Singapore and basically the rest of the world in the 2050s, you play as Amira Darma, a former cop who left the force for reasons she doesn’t really want to get into. She does what anyone would do in that situation, become a private detective. From there she’s set on a path of unraveling murders, conspiracies, and returning postage stamps to their country and city of origin.
Chinatown Detective Agency is more or less a puzzle game in the style of classic point and click adventure games and edutainment classics like Where in the World is Carmen San Diego. You’re solving logic puzzles, ciphers, and geography questions. The major caveat is that the game knows that you have the internet and it wants you to use it. A good portion of the puzzles in this game require you to do your own detective work, using the few clues provided to you from the game and researching on your search engine of choice. Most of these come from Amira needing to travel to another country for some reason or another, but the question usually comes in the form of what country she NEEDS to go to. You see Amira needs to get places, but getting places costs money, which is hard to get by on your own so a plane ticket to the wrong place will put you back a little, meaning your research needs to be good before you fly out.
At first, this feels kind of overwhelming, kind of like Google the game, but as the more obscure puzzles start coming in it feels incredibly satisfying to crack them. Finding out what city to go through by finding the obscure old title it used to go by, or by a string of text in a foreign language on a stamp just feels cool. It reaches a point where at times you feel less like a private eye and more like an academic researcher, which is surprisingly just as cool. The fact that you come out of most of these, we’ll call them Research Puzzles, actually learning something just makes them feel that much more satisfying. These puzzles don’t just stop with geography, they also include figuring out books from strings of text and a few other fun variations.
The game does operate on a day and time system, meaning there’s a few time sensitive cases in the game. It can get a bit frustrating as you rush against it, especially when so much of the game is based around looking at info in another window. It never really reaches a point where you feel like it’s locking you out too much, but if you’re looking for a chiller puzzle and detective vibe it adds maybe a bit more stress than you would want.
Chinatown Detective Agency tells a pretty typical cyberpunk noir story on a more global scale as you dart across countries looking for clues, leads, and perps. You get a feel for how the world reacts to some of the changes that usually come in a cyberpunk future as opposed to just a city or singular country, as well as how actual history intersects with that. It’s not incredibly deep, but it’s enough to stay interesting as you visit each country and see how it intersects with the larger plot. The voice acting isn’t the greatest, but it’s never annoyingly bad and you get used to it.
The Final Word
If you’re in the mood for a cyber noir soaked old-school point and click, then no further. Chinatown Detective Agency does justice to the old school vibes it aspires to while also setting itself apart by having a fun and unique way to solve puzzles. It can get a bit overwhelming at times, especially as the clock starts ticking down, but the satisfaction of cracking a case is worth the extra stress.
– MonsterVine Rating: 4 out of 5 – Good
