Crime O’Clock is an exploritive point-and-click crime-solving puzzle game developed by Bad Seed and published by Just For Games. The issue with point-and-click puzzle games is, making it different from the rest of them can oppose as a challenge for developers, let’s see what they did to stand out!

Story

In Crime O’Clock you take on the role of a sort of interdimensional detective. Solving crimes between different timelines to balance out the one true timeline. With the help of your A.I. Database companion you jump between multiple timelines that have had some sort of crime that wasn’t supposed to happen and you use context clues to solve each crime ultimately fixing the true timeline.

With each crime seemingly unraveling in front of you, you go tick by tick discovering clues to lead you to the suspect to turn them into the proper authorities to prevent the crimes before it messes with the timeline. Each crime comes with an evolving story that will make you dive deep into each character and learn new pieces of evidence to uncover what changed for the suspect to make the crime happen.

The more crimes you solve the more you start to uncover, these aren’t just misshaps that are happening to mess up the timeline. There is malicious intent coming from some unknown entities. It’s up to you and your A.I. database to uncover who they are, what they want, and how to stop them.

Gameplay

It’s Crime O’Clock somewhere, put your thinking cap on because it’s time to solve some puzzles. Each crime is a multi-step puzzle that takes place over a span of up to ten ticks in time. Each tick in time brings an entirely new scene with new items, new faces, and a new chain of events. Each puzzle also has different steps to solving the crime starting out with identifying the crime, identifying who the victim is, then it traces steps back until you figure out the suspect and you solve the crime.

When solving a crime you’ll start on the last time tick, number 10. Here you find the victim of the crime. After finding the crime scene it might take you to another layer of the game where you do DNA readings to identify the victim. The DNA readings are just puzzles inside the puzzle, its a puzzle-ception. After identifying the victim it will generally take you back a tick so you can see what the victim is doing right before the crime and then follow them until you see something suspicious. After finding your suspect you follow them sometimes all the way back to tick number one. After following them and finding out their reasoning for committing the crime you are able to turn them into the proper authorities to restore the timeline.

There are multiple levels in each puzzle, it starts out with a larger picture where you have to locate the crime based on context clues given by the A.I. Database. Don’t worry if you get stuck, you get up to three hints per part of each level that pretty much tell you exactly where it is. Then after identifying the crime you wil do one of the smaller puzzles that goes “deeper” into the frame. This will be a DNA matching game, or a facial recognition face match mini-game. After that you identify your suspect and do another mini-game and this time including a tracking mini-game that includes quick reactions.

Audio and Visual

As far as audio goes, you could probably play this game on mute and get the exact same experience. Since it is a click-and-find it very much relies on it’s visuals. For the visuals, I was excited by them right away because it was this large picture with lots of tiny little details if you scroll around the screen you find more and more little easter eggs. Like I found some Rick and Morty and other pop culture references hidden in there. That was all really cool, I only wish that there were more pops of color rather than just the writing while solving crimes.

The dialogue from the A.I. database is pretty humorous I have to admit. You’re supposed to be based in a sort of timeless area since you are hopping around time lines, but this insures that there’s a lot of subtle cracks at modern times through “the eyes of the all-seeing.”

Replayability

Puzzle games like this, lack a little bit in this category. Once you finish a level you can replay it trying to complete it faster but it’s the same puzzle as the first time you completed it. It would be nice to have maybe a challenge mode with random cases and more difficult puzzles.

What It Could Have Done Better

I wish the game would have had a little bit more diversity in the solving of the crimes. Some of them do vary more than others, like having to solve a musical melody in order to restore the timeline, but more often than not it was just victim, suspect, puzzles, then solved. The hints also gave away way too much for the puzzles making them all too easy. If you wait what feels like 10 to 15 seconds you will get a hint, and the hints will basically tell you exactly where it is and you get three of them per step. Sometimes I would find myself not trying nearly hard enough because I knew the hint would tell me exactly where it was.

Verdict

Crime O’Clock being a point-and-click puzzle game, has some clever aspects to it. The story is fun and lighthearted with some quick wit from the A.I. I can appreciate the easter eggs and little references that are dropped into the levels in a tasteful and subtle way. With more diversity and a little bit more of a challenge the game could have been more fun, but for what it is and what it’s trying to deliver, I think it does it well. It’s a nice game to pass time when you don’t have much else to do, or for me it was perfect for a long car ride.

Crime O’Clock is available now for PC via Steam and Nintendo Switch.