Scene Investigators is a crime scene investigation game published and developed by EQ Studios. In Scene Investigators you’re immersed directly into a true crime show and you have to solve the crimes for yourself. As a semi-avid true-crime podcast listener, I thought “Wow this will be a cake walk.” I could not have been more wrong, let’s see how the game did besides the difficulty.

Gameplay

Scene Investigators is every CSI: Miami fan’s dream. Step into a crime scene take in all the information that you can and answer the questions for the scene. Generally the questions will be along the lines of “Who is the killer,” or “Who was here at the time of the crime.” There are a lot of different questions that could be asked but each set of questions brings on a whole new challenge, and I mean challenge.

Talking to the title, this game made me feel real dumb. There is a disclosure when you start the game that says they purposely only give you about 70% of the information and then you have to use context clues to piece together what happened at the scene of the crime. But mostly what I was piecing together was my sanity trying to just shoot guesses into the dark. Did I take that one forensic science class in high school for nothing? (Yeah, kind of). NOTE TO SELF: Don’t try to be a detective as your normal job.

This 100% is a skill issue, there’s no denial in that so I’m not going to judge the game on how well I did or how far I got because the game is interesting and it sets out to do exactly what it does. It means to challenge you, it doesn’t set out to give you the answers because it’s supposed to be at least semi-realistic. You really do feel like a detective, you’ll feel lost just picking everything up and looking at everything you can. Just when nothing is making sense, BAM, you pick up that recipt thrown behind the couch that has the exact date and time charged to the suspects card that shows it couldn’t have been them! Those eureka moments really do feel amazing, when you have them. Good luck, you’re really going to need to think outside the box.

Graphics and Sound

The visuals in this game are basic first person puzzle game graphics, really nothing special. The audio follows in the same footsteps. There’s footsteps that you hear anywhere and a soft piano soundtrack in the background. When you pick up anything with paper and turn the page it sounds the same, it must be a default sound online. There’s really nothing special, the game relys on it’s gameplay which I think is good, I shouldn’t judge all games harshly on their graphics and sound quality.

Feedback

I played this game for quite sometime and I made little to no progress. The best thing for this game would be an easy mode where either there was a little more evidence or there were some hints that sort of guided the way you should use evidence. Now I don’t think there should be an unlimited amount, it could maybe allow two per scene or even one per scene when you’ve really hit a wall. I don’t want to take away from the difficulty too much, but it would just make the game more accessable to all.

I do also think that this game would be fun as a multiplayer experience, that way you could bounce ideas of each other and take seperate rooms so you can spend more time combing through the entire scene.

Verdict

Scene Investigators is a very unique style of game, it’s a puzzle game where they don’t give you every single piece to the puzzle and you’re required to use deductive reasoning to solve the crimes. While the game could benefit from a few editions to the game, I think it’s fine the way it is and anybody looking for a real challenge should check it out.

Scene Investigators is available now for PC via Steam.