How well can you piece together a scenario from context clues? Little Problems tests your observation skills by presenting you with a series of situations to study and explain by collecting clues for your diary.
Little Problems: A Cozy Detective Game
Developer: Posh Cat Studios
Price: TBA
Platforms: PC (reviewed)
MonsterVine was supplied with a PC code for review.
Little Problems: A Cozy Detective Game follows a young woman named Mary as she goes through her first year at college. It describes itself as being about solving mysteries around everyday events, which you might assume makes it a sort of small-scale detective story. However, the main character isn’t a detective, and most of the situations presented here aren’t mysteries from a narrative perspective. Instead, the mysteries are solely for the player, who must look at each scene and use context clues to figure out what is happening.
The game is split into cases, each of which presents a different situation from Mary’s year. You can click on objects in the environment to gather clues, with the option to mark or not mark interactive spots. Most clues are words added to your list, while others are visual. For example, you might click on a character to see their phone, from which you can get the names of people who recently sent them messages and keywords about what they discussed. Some clue locations won’t contribute to your list but are there for your reference, as you need to piece together the full situation.
To “solve” each case, you enter these clues in Mary’s diary. There, you’ll find an entry with blanks for you to fill in, along with pictures of characters involved for you to enter their names. Each diary entry is split into sections, some of which are required to progress while others are optional. Once you fill in a section, the game either marks it correct or indicates how many answers you got wrong. You also have the ability to highlight an incorrect answer. In this way, it’s possible to brute force the solution by guessing every option, although the core of the gameplay is figuring out the answer yourself.
Instead of a detective game, I would describe Little Problems as an unusual sort of puzzle game, one that tests your observation and comprehension skills. A character might be carrying a paper that shows you part of their name. Another character’s phone messages could contain a clue about who someone else is. You might need to check both a calendar and a class schedule to figure out what day it is, or consult a library’s computer to figure out who was getting which book. Those are the kinds of situations it asks you to figure out: who was involved in the scene, and what was each of them doing there? For something that sounds so simple on the surface, it gets to be quite challenging, especially as more characters and complex situations are introduced. Fortunately, you can type notes for yourself, so it isn’t entirely reliant on memorization.
Little Problems Struggles to Balance Coziness With Challenge
While these cases show glimpses into Mary’s life, you also unlock a few additional scenes as you play, which help present its slice-of-life story. The cute art and pleasant music give it the cozy vibes it’s aiming for, too. However, it never really gave me enough to get invested in the characters. The whole point of the game is that it lacks a high-stakes story, but I would have liked more time spent with the characters so I could get attached to them instead of just using my knowledge of them as a baseline to figure out other parts of each case. Without a stronger hook to keep me interested in understanding each scenario, the gameplay started to feel tedious after a while. I was intrigued by the idea of solving small day-to-day mysteries, but Little Problems wasn’t quite what I’d hoped for.
The Final Word
Little Problems: A Cozy Detective Game is cute, and its puzzles really put your comprehension skills to the test. Beyond that, however, it doesn’t have too much else to offer. It’s an interesting experience, but one that ultimately ends up feeling rather bland.
MonsterVine Rating: 3 out of 5 – Average
