Usually when I try to enjoy point and click games I get frustrated with the nonsensical puzzles that are more about trying to combine any two items out there until you find a match rather than having it be a logical solution that can be guessed using logic and common sense. For the majority of The Darkside Detective it actually surprised me by having well thought out puzzles that I enjoyed. Combine that with a good soundtrack and fantastic humour and I can say it is quite possibly one of the best point and click games I have played. It did start to let me down as some of the later cases do exactly what I was hoping to avoid with puzzles that made little sense as well as having to go talk to people I wouldn’t have thought to before it would let me complete a task I knew I had to do. Luckily this did not ruin my overall enjoyment and wasn’t a major portion of the overall game. There isn’t much over arching story but that really wasn’t needed. The characters themselves made up for it and made each case fun. The game itself had a special charm to it. It didn’t take itself too seriously; had great dialogue and some great references to other media. The graphics themselves won’t win any awards but even the game knew to poke fun at that. It ran better on a potato of a computer than it probably should have so it’s not like it wasn’t optimized. If you can’t wow with visuals then at least run well and it did for the most part.

    I played The Darkside Detective on Linux. It never crashed on me and I didn’t notice any spelling errors. The game auto saves at various points. A manual save system would have been nice but luckily the cases aren’t long enough and the save points too far apart to cause me any issues. There is just one graphics option. Alt-Tab didn’t work. The game for the most part ran at my refresh rate of 75 FPS but could drop down to the 20’s for a few seconds at a time. This wasn’t overly bothersome given the point and click nature of the game and was expected on my system.

Game Engine: Unity
Save System: Auto
Disk Space Used: 1.6GB
Game Setting: “High Def”

CPU Usage: 4-18 %
RAM Usage: 1.5-2.3 GB
Frame Rate: 21-75 FPS

    I really enjoyed my time with The Darkside Detective and will be looking for future games from Spooky Doorway. I finished the normal and bonus cases in five hours and fifty two minutes total. The cases felt like a good length each.  Even if you don’t usually care for point and click games like myself I would give the demo a try. I paid $7.59 for the game and it is easily worth $30 if they had wanted to charge that. The characters; music and humour are top notch. The puzzles are a mixed bag but more good than bad.

My Score: 8/10

My System:

Intel I7-4770 | 16GB DDR3-2133 CL9 | Intel HD 4600 1536MB | Mesa 20.0.8 | Samsung 850 Evo 250GB | Trisquel 9.0 | Mate 1.20.0 | Kernel 5.10.9-gnu