Since I’ve been on a mystery/detective game kick lately, I’ve been thinking about what I really want from a detective game. Many years ago, I tried several of the Sherlock Holmes games by Frogwares. They were highly-esteemed, and while I don’t particularly like Sherlock Holmes, that was all that was available at the time. Oh, and the Ace Attorney games, but I did not gel with those when I tried them out. Maybe I’d like them better now, but I’m skeptical. In fact, one of the things introduced in the third chapter of Murders on the Yangtze River (OMEGAMES STUDIO) is debating. That’s when the accused person gets to debate you and say why you’re wrong. Again, it doesn’t really matter if you run out of attempts and fail because the game will just scold you and then put you back into it again.
However, one irritating thing is that you can’t skip the dialogue from the debate the second time around. So I’m angrily mashing space to get through it, and then sometimes, press space one time too many. I don’t understand it because they allow you to skip repeated dialogue elsewhere, so it’s not as if they don’t know how to do it.
Anyway, this debate thing reminds me of the parts of other detective games that irritate me (and that occurs in this game to a lesser extent in other areas of the game) in that the ‘logic’ isn’t logical to me. Some of the connections the game makes, especially in this section, are a stretch–at least for my brain.
That’s a big reason I did not like the Sherlock Holmes games. The logic was not logical. In fact, that’s how I felt about point-and-clicks in general. In those games, it was more like, “Pick up a ball of yarn, some lint, a worn-out shoe, and a pair of keys, combine them, and make a transistor radio!” It never made any sense, and what was even more irritating was when I would walk by something, knowing that I would have to pick it up at some time, but I could not pick it up then.
I have quit more than one game because of this, by the way. In detective games, you have to do some of that, but it’s more like ridiculous pretzel tying while deducing what is happening in a case. Sometimes, it’s the game presuming that the player has a ridiculous amount of knowledge in esoteric subjects. Or will be able to make leaps of faith that aren’t ludicrous.
Side note: I have to say that since these games are all very popular, I will concede that it might be that my brain just isn’t built to do logic in this way. Either other people can make connections I can’t, or they are having less qualms about looking shit up. By the way, I have looked up what other people think about point-and-clicks, and those who don’t like them stated the same reasons that I don’t like it: really convoluted and bizarre logic, having to combine random items to make another random item, and the UI.