Interesting game. The good news is I am your target audience. The bad news is that I am your target audience.
I only got as far as completing the first three cases for now. First off: it's incredibly difficult to get a game like this right, so I am going to say that I look at everything you attempt to do with great admiration, but there are shortcomings and they need to be covered.
The game is experimental, which is both its strength and its weakness. I'm not a big fan of input-based games. I think there is a reason why text-based adventure games went extinct -- It doesn't mean it's impossible to do, just that it's really really hard to pull off since there's and enormous range of player-system interactions that the developer needs to account for and that takes time and intensive work. Playing this game a lot of the time feels like banging your head against a wall, and when the wall finally starts to crack the next hit just magically makes it fix itself. There were too many moments where telling a suspect about something they already admitted just resulted in the same old denial. I think that's just a flaw inherent in this type of gameplay.
And this is just the tutorial cases. I can only imagine it gets more complex further on.
I think something that needs to be said is that developer intent should never be underestimated and a game that's supposed to be carried by dynamic algorithms loses a lot of that, so it's easy to get lost in the logic.
The UI is very bland and not very attention grabbing. Considering that games like these are supposed to be carried by their UI design I think it needs to be more visually distinct and organized (weirdly the AI dimension is somewhat better at this). Important to note most of the UX bugs are UI-related. Menu buttons (start screen; the city vista screen) very often require 2 clicks to respond and there's no real feedback from the buttons so you're just wondering sometimes if the game froze.
I really want to see more of this, since it's a step in the right direction, but it's a very rough implementation. Player frustration is a big pitfall of all real detective games, so it's always important to account for that. I think a good detective game makes a player feel gratified in his moment-to-moment thinking process, and provides satisfying feedback when he hits the nail right on the head (something that I also struggle with implementing) -- when you make a correct statement or accusation the game usually just spits back a "noted" or "acknowledged" back at you, but I think that this is the perfect place to throw a lead in the player's face (correct action => progression path).
Overall an above average DD game. I like it but I wouldn't call it a great detective experience yet.
