itch.io

Really good concept, i felt it was held back by its execution. The biggest problem for me was the way you find new clues through the search engine. Having it be 2 words most of the time instead of one, made it feel really random what the game actually wanted from me. A lot of times i felt like i wanted to know about something, but it just gave me nothing. I would recommend looking at "roottrees are dead" for inspiration on how to make a search engine better, i think its a really tough task though. The biggest problem for me where the phone calls, they just all seemed really unhelpful and only responded to really specific things.

A bit more feedback on wrong answers would've been really nice, right now you can't even tell if you entered something, since there is no feedback.

As for the plot, a big thing that made it feel unsatisfying at the end, was the fact that the twist of there being a mobster who killed evelyn just came out of nowhere, i think it would feel better if every character is established early, with multiple being plausible for who would've done it, and in the midgame some evidence being revealed, that makes other candidates more/less likely, so you need to rethink who you thought it was.

The way it is now it felt really more like, there was no way of knowing this before finding the right documents, so it felt more like exploration rather than deduction. Also that Hargrove had a gambling problem is the same, the motivation just felt like it came out of nowhere. From the Podcast you knew someone was in debt, but i felt like there needed to be multiple candidates, the way it is now, hargrove was the only plausible choice.