Detective Instinct: Farewell, My Beloved is ostensibly a mystery adventure game, which you will know because their Steam store page repeatedly states that it is and was inspired by classic ADV games. It was also obviously inspired by the Ace Attorney series for its character art and writing and Hotel Dusk for a lot of its art and settings. I even see some Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors in its achievement art, which would round out the DS visual novel classics. All of these are great inspirations to have, but they are also all horribly misleading about what DI actually is. If you go in expecting something like any of those games, you will likely be extremely disappointing with the experience.
Detective Instinct‘s biggest problem is that it pitches itself as something that it just fundamentally is not. It claims to have a command system that maximizes player interaction and discovery, but you hardly ever have any meaningful freedom about what to do in the game. The Go To command is unavailable except when you’ve checked off all the interactions in an area almost all of the time, and when you do have access to it, there is always either only one option available or it’s irrelevant what order you do the scenes in. It further claims to have tons of optional dialogue and interactions that reward exploration, and it may be true that many conversation topics are technically optional, but the game is designed in a way that makes every interaction effectively mandatory. You can’t advance from a scene until you’ve cleared all of the hidden requirements, but meeting them generally requires repeatedly clicking on every conversation topic until they stop giving new dialogue. It hardly gives you any sense of exploration or curiosity if the game is training you to expect that you must click on everything and choose every topic with every character to advance.
It probably won’t come as a surprise, then, that Detective Instinct’s gameplay also fails in its goal of maximizing deduction while minimizing brute force. You’re basically forced to brute force the entire game, so that part is obvious, but the deduction hardly fares any better since most puzzles are almost offensively easy. At the risk of a minor spoiler that no one would be surprised by anyway, the game spends almost an entire chapter asking you to solve the mystery of what career a guy who doesn’t speak, wears a top hat, and performs card tricks might have. Just in case there was any risk that you might focus on him not speaking and think he’s a mime, the game explicitly tells you that he isn’t, then gives ‘mime’ as a choice in the final review anyway. The final chapter does a little better with presenting an actual mystery, but most of the game operates at a level of handholding that would be more appropriate for a third grade edutainment game. If that sounds mean, just wait until the game asks you to solve the magician riddle for a second time when it’s only been 10 minutes since you already proved you knew the answer.
I’ve seen a few reviews saying that Detective Instinct is better approached as a linear visual novel than as a mystery adventure game. I’m not considering that in my review since the game repeatedly claims to be the latter, but if you’re willing to look past that, you definitely will have a better experience if you treat it as an almost kinetic VN. I wouldn’t call it a great experience even then, because the main characters are dull and the pacing is such that I spent most of the game wondering why we were so invested in this mystery at all, but a few of the NPCs are at least entertainingly quirky. Inspector Daltrey and the bartender in particular do a lot of the heavy lifting of keeping the game interesting. If you think you’d have a good time playing Ace Attorney using a walkthrough so that you didn’t have to think about the cases, DI offers something close to that experience.
On a final negative note, Detective Instinct spends a lot of time on the political situation of the fictional European country it starts out in. I won’t go too much into it since the specifics are meant to be a surprise (not that they are very surprising), but the country is some kind of fusion of Cold War Germany, Ireland, and perhaps formerly Soviet Eastern Europe where half the country is a prosperous republic and the other half is occupied by a foreign oppressor. I agree with the message I think they intended to convey with all of this, but the world building is so peripheral and the characters are so direct about everything that it just comes off a bit hamfisted. It’d hardly be the first mystery game to ever have a clumsily constructed world, though, so as long as you’re comfortable with not thinking about whether the finer details of the world make any sense, I don’t think it’s a huge deal.
Outside of the gameplay and writing, Detective Instinct does succeed in emulating the games that inspired it. The character sprites are expressive and well made. The scenes with full screen art do a great job of conveying what’s happening and easily live up to their DS predecessors. The pre-rendered backgrounds are a particularly nice touch and combine with the sprites in a very satisfying way. It’ll be the graphics that convince most people to give DI a shot, because it looks excellent in just about any screenshot. The sound design can be pretty good as well, although I was more convinced by the effects than the relatively dull OST. Thankfully, most of the game doesn’t play music at all and lets the stronger sound effects take center stage. Although I didn’t enjoy my time with DI, anyone who buys it just for the aesthetics is going to get their money’s worth.
Conclusion
In the end, Detective Instinct is a game that’s let down by its marketing. It is determined to make you expect a mystery adventure game with deep exploration and tough deduction, yet utterly fails to deliver any of that. It’s fine as a nostalgic VN, but I can’t give it much credit for that when I bought it expecting a proper mystery. If you’re willing to look past all of that and don’t mind a fairly short experience, it might be worthwhile on sale. For everyone else, you’re not missing much by giving this a pass.
Rating: 60%
Time to beat: 4-5 hours
Price: $20
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For more reviews, see my Steam curator page: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/43219041