Crime Secrets: Crimson Lily Review (Luminous)
Wow, does this one go off the rails about halfway through. It begins promising enough. I love the "9 clues" gimmick and already played the other two games with that theme and liked them. I liked that all three games are set in a "real world" universe with a crime theme. I am so sick of games based on fairy tales and utterly ridiculous, pointless fantasy worlds. In those other games, there don't seem to be any stakes and the storylines are nonexistent or not compelling.
Don't get me wrong. This game starts out great! Just as good as the other two. You're a detective and there's a mystery at a hotel. I honestly forget the rest because when this game gets bad, it gets real bad and lost the plot so much that I forgot the original plot.
What goes bad?
- The translations go to shit. My first clue was when a HO puzzle asked for a "bowl" and it turned out it meant "bow." Two very different things. From that point on, there were many translation issues.
- The names of the characters get more and more ridiculous. One guy is named "Weekly" and another is named "Grief." These are supposed to be normal last names, not nicknames or something. I was thrown out of immersion whenever these characters' names were spoken.
- The plot goes haywire.
- Cutscenes are skipped or cut short. There are some scene jumps that appear to have originally been planned to have a cutscene because they're abrupt and unexplained. One moment you're in a basement and the next you're in a snowbank, stuff like that.
- Dialogue is badly edited.
- There were one or two spots that seemed to have been designed to be a puzzle but weren't.
Overall, I suspect there were funding issues with this game, where money ran short and they had to rush it out.
The voice acting is...acceptable...and there's a good deal of it, which I generally appreciate. The cutscenes, when done well, are very good.
I really like this style of point-and-click/HO game and highly recommend the other two "9 clues" games.