izigame.me

This game is not a very good detective game. First, I should point the superficial flaws: The game is extremely buggy. Every other time I opened the journal (something that is necessary very often), I ran into either a game-crash or a softlock, which required me to restart the program. To the game's credit, I should point out that it autosaves constantly and I did not have to replay any segments due to this. But even so, having to go back through all the start menus about once every hour is not an ideal gameplay experience.
Another superficial flaw is that the game is difficult to read. The text stored in the journal is of a font that is thin enough such that some pieces of the letters do not show up at all at the game's default resolution. In addition, the size of the text characters and spacing of the letters makes it difficult to read the text at a glance. The testimonies cannot be zoomed in on at all, and some of the documents' text was still illegible even when viewed at full zoom. There is a slider in the option menu labeled "text size," but after messing with it a bit, I cannot claim to know whether or not it actually affects anything.
Finally, there's the important stuff: the detective gameplay. Simply put, the game gives you insufficient evidence or guidance. Many times throughout the game, I found myself unsure what question I was even supposed to be answering. Due to the mechanics also not being clearly explained, I found myself unsure what I was suppsed to be doing at any given time. Here is one example in particular that stands out to me: the "Connections" feature is explained as a way to find connections between evidence and testimonies, with no more info given. So, when I attempt to connect a testimony saying that someone is named "Veronique" with the name "Veronique" that appears on a document, I expect to get some sort of feedback, but no. The game does not let you prove that that document relates to that person, because who the document belongs to isn't one one of the question the game wants you to answer, and you're expected to just know that. Once I did get past all the glitches and manage to use the ingame hint system, it did give me a vague idea of what question I needed to answer, but not much more than that.
More egregious than this, however, is that the deductions themselves rely on extremely shaky evidence. At first I assumed that the evidence was just well hidden or illegible, and the logic convoluted, but those assumptions were shaken when I played the section of the game where we went over a few conclusions with detailed logic (which the player was still providing). Playing through this section, it became easily apparent just how shit this game's logic really is. The clearest example: "the drugs must belong to you because every other suspect told me they don't like drugs." For reference, one of the statements that that deduction relies on consists of a single throwaway line. Another question in the same sequence is literally unnkowable, and the game's indended? solution requires reinterpreting one of the words into something clearly not intended by the person asking the question so as to change the question into an answerable one. If the game gave any indication that this is what you are supposed to do, or at the very least given me more than one chance to input the correct answer, this might have been a cool puzzle. But it does nothing of the sort.
I did not continue playing the game after this first confrontation. I suppose it is possible that the game suddenly becomes better about some of these things in the following chapters, but I find that highly doubtful.