Scene Investigators Review (Shippu)
I respect the effort that went into this but I feel like this was a huge step back from The Painscreek Killings (the dev's previous game).
It feels like you're trying to solve a riddle where the information the game chooses to give you vs what you don't get feels completely arbitrary, to the point where it feels like the scenes were completely made up to be a needlessly difficult puzzle as opposed to a believable scenario that you're trying to solve.
In the scenario "The 4th Floor - Room 401" you're tasked with (among other things) figuring out who was murdered (which I feel like that information would be already known by the police who drew the chalk outline around the corpse of the person who was murdered, which only further feels like you're just going through made-up scenarios with no actual causality in the world, but hey I'm just a detective what do I know).
One of the big clues is that the main tenant of the apartment worked a job with clearly defined hours, with notes to a babysitter about when they would be returning home. Cool, so since we know times when one of our main characters would be out of the building, surely we can cross-reference that with the police report with information about the crime like we had access to in the tutorial level to potentially cross one name off our list, right? Ha, no, that would be too easy.
The game tries to give plenty of red herrings, which sure that makes sense so you don't just brute-force the solution, but it gets to the point where there's just so much useless information and nowhere near enough explanation for certain events that even if you bother to sift through absolutely everything to figure out what's relevant and what's not, you still need to make logical leaps and assumptions simply because you lack the information to rule out certain possibilities.
It feels artificial. The child conveniently kept an empty bottle of alcohol her father drinks because the smell reminds her of him, so you can conveniently match it to a receipt found in a wallet for the same brand of beer (as if it's impossible for more than one person to drink the same brand of beer, and you can never swap brands once you start). Thank god the mother didn't notice the glass bottle the child meticulously hid by... placing it directly on a table in plain sight, or else she would've thrown it away as she was going to check on the gun safe stored in her child's room for some reason (that also randomly has an etch-a-sketch in it for some reason).
TL;DR the game focuses way too much on trying to be "clever" and "challenging" but instead just becomes tedious, unbelievable and uninteresting.