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A jam submission

Unusual investigatorView game page

Unusual investigator is a game about an investigator who must figure out the cause of death and the motive for a crime
Submitted by JokerWD, (de)om0ng — 4 hours, 5 minutes before the deadline
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Unusual investigator's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Presentation#183.2804.400
Concept#213.1304.200
Enjoyment#262.6833.600
Overall#262.8323.800
Use of the Limitation#322.2363.000

Ranked from 5 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

Team members
JokerWD, (de)om0ng

Software used
Unity

Use of the limitation
Our main character teleports through time to solve an abandoned case.

Cookies eaten
During development, one of our employees ate a package of cookies and got fined for it "he should have shared :( "

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Comments

Submitted(+1)
Semi-on-the-fly remarks:
  1. Game page: "To complete the game, you need to specify the place of the crime, what the crime was committed and the motive of the crime." -> reminds me heavily of "Return of the Obra Dinn"!
  2. Game page says no file found for navigator version; maybe you put the wrong type of project in the parameters? (Or is it a witty way of having people forced to open the game page? X))
  3. Controls are QWERTY-only instead of layout-independent (I have an AZERTY keyboard), BUT arrow keys are enabled.
  4. Wow, nice in-house setting! :) Rather colourful. And sweet melancholic music!
  5. small detail: you can move your head while in notepad mode ;)
  6. nice sinister music for noir mode, too
  7. I would suggest having a counter showing how many times you can still trigger noir mode.
  8. Oh, you can CLICK to interact!! :o Found out during second use of noir mode in the kitchen; you should add this to the controls on the game page!
  9. Spoiler: levitating axe in past fridge; is this normal? X)
  10. (reflection error already mentioned in another comment)
  11. Oh, lost! :o Thought I had it!!
  12. Ah, restarting, I see the left window in the living room moving up! This could be cause by its resetting not instantaneously?
  13. Trying to get a bug by switching to noir mode in a door space: no. X)
  14. Spoiler or not: Oh, the drawers in the small bedroom (with the blue-blanket bed) are still all open! Caused by my first run? Or maybe not, seeing how the bed is absent, so possible robbery. X) Yes, even the refrigerator is not there!
  15. I feel like you can legitimately miss essential clues by not going to the right rooms, since three noir modes is quite scarce.
  16. Checking if I missed some objective: mispring "what the crime was committed" instead of "what crime was committed" (or "how the crime was committed"?) in the game page. ;)
  17. The clues are often quite subtle. I like how everything is implicit! :) Spoiler: I am thinking of the bottle I just noticed on the piece of furniture.
  18. I wonder what is written on these papers…
  19. Spoiler: maybe something in the lower-right drawer of the master bedroom, but the black/grey tint makes it hard to see! :o I think this is the knife.
  20. I just keep on losing, you really have to know where to look!! :o X)
  21. WON! :D For ‘Suicide’, which I think was the easier one. Spoiler: because I found the means first, which indicates at the same time the sort of crime, and which gave me a hint of which room to look in.
  22. What?! Lost for the ‘Violence’ one, I think I had it nailed down! Spoiler: nailed it on my next try when I could check more and see once more the bed was stolen. I thought the papers and bottles indicated the guy was nervous and had a drinking problem, so I thought of domestic violence. XD
  23. I like how some cases are not that obvious when you lack clues. :) So far, only one out of the three was really straightforward, but I may have been lucky to find the right thing first.
  24. By the way, very small detail: the texts for the motived are not ‘centered’ in the same way; I am not sure whether this is intentional. I am being nitpicky here. ;)
  25. Solved the third and final case, which was ‘Violence’! Although I did not find the body, actually… :o
  26. Trying to find the last body: I finally notice the eerie music box in noir mode music. X) Which sounds great.
  27. Realizing just now that the melancholy and pills can make you think of "Max Payne" (painkillers, anyone?). Noir and murder too!
  28. Still cannot find the ‘Violence’ body… Spoiler: I thought it would be in the small room whose door is next to the blueish painting, but it is not. Maybe the objects are enough, but this is not obvious, as they are displaced in several rooms!

Takeaway: clever concept, generally clever clues. I am not sure how the (clever) main mechanic (the noir mode) is related to the constraint, though? :o Maybe you mean that the current time is temporary, or that the player’s view of the past is temporary? I may have misunderstood.

The impliciteness of everything is great (and a good way to have less obvious clues than with text/speech); the three-time limitation for the noir mode made things a bit frustrating, as you cannot see all rooms at one time (which may be voluntary, to force the player to investigate more insightfully), but restarting was thankfully quick. I tend to think having another way to deal with the difficulty could have been better; for example, replacing the number limit by a time limit, and possibly randomising some stuff (such as putting the objects in random drawers!), so that the player cannot capitalize on his previous runs and still has some close investigating to do. :)

Really liked the concept, and the atmosphere in this lonely sorry house made me feel a bit blue… :o Nice one!

Submitted(+1)

Lots of detail considering the 72hr time limit!

Noir mode was super creepy. Big fan of that.

One minor criticism would be that sometimes when interacting with white objects, I couldn't see my reticle to know what I was clicking on exactly - not a massive problem but a black and white point might help in the future!

Developer

We are very glad that you liked our game, in our future  games will not be this problem.

Thanks for the feedback and playing :)

Submitted(+1)

game looks really good great job on the graphics the music was eerie well in noir mode. How many scenarios did you put in I noticed that one time plating the body was in the closet in the room with everything being thrown around and all the draws and even the fridge missing. And other times it was a suicide in the bath room with pills all over the place in the past.

Developer

In our game there are only 3 scenarios (robbery, suicide and violence ). Probably random in our game does not work very well. 

Thanks for playing :)

Submitted(+1)

ah nice I got the 2 wins but probably didn't see something for the violence probably used noir mode in the wrong rooms for it.

Submitted(+1)

To me, the game lacks instructions: i did not read the game’s page at all, so i was just walking aimlessly trying to find out what i was supposed to do and at the end had to close it, confused. Then, once i read the page, i tried that noir mode a couple times when, all of a sudden, it stopped working, forcing me to close it, confused again. If only i read the page properly, i would have noticed that it works three times.

Conclusion: i have to read more carefully.

But the game also could tell me how many times i have left. And what i am supposed to do.

Graphically, this game is very good. For some reason, the thing that impressed me the most was the reflections on mirrors and glasses, although the one in the shower is wrong and shows the living room instead.

However, the house feels “empty”: there is nothing in the drawers, closets, fridge, etc. and looked more of a show house rather than somebody’s home. Once i found out about noir mode and that it transports me back to the past, i assumed that the house was on the market and the night of the death would be different, but it was not the case.

Did whoever lived there kill themselves because of the emptiness of their lives? Who knows such things….

I guessed that the reason for blocking me access to some areas during noir mode was to force me to choose carefully how to spend the three opportunities. However, as a player, i felt that it was more an inconvenience that anything else.

The music is simple, but very effective. Specially during noir mode, that gave me the creeps as i believe it should.

Finally, distributing the game for Windows in a RAR archive is an inconvenience for some of us, because the File Explorer cannot open such files and had to download unrar just for it. In a jam is not so much of a problem, but in general i would advise to stick with ZIP.

I hope my comments do not sound too negative, because i think this game is good and the problems i wrote about are just the result of the short time window that the jam allows.

Very well done!

Developer (1 edit)

Thanks for your feedback, we appreciate such a qualitative review on our game, we will try better in the future to fix all our problems and become better.

And, of course, thanks for playing. :)

Submitted (1 edit) (+1)

Best game I saw so far, really love the different scenarios and how you have to solve the murder, It's a little bit like cluedo. Gave it a max score.

Developer

Thanks for the comment, glad you liked our game, will try to make good games more :)

Submitted(+1)

For some reason the game cannot be loaded

Developer(+1)

Sorry, I made a mistake in the settings now everything is fixed