Successfully funded on Kickstarter two years ago, Chinatown Detective Agency is a mystery game that aims to fill the void left by a certain Carmen Sandiego since her last appearance in the 2000s.
5
Voir le testChinatown Detective Agency
- A seductive aesthetic
- Engaging puzzles that mobilize us "offside"
- Fully lined
- Successful sound design...
- Good replayability...
This 2D game is enhanced by rather neat pixel art and full voice acting, and offers a (necessarily) dark vision of Singapore at the end of the 2030s.
Cold-blooded murders, cynical megacorporations, artificial intelligence at the dawn of singularity and state corruption… Imagine Bernard de la Villardière walking straight towards the camera, and let's go for the test.
Test carried out on PC from a commercial version. The game is available in Game Pass on Xbox and PC as well as Nintendo Switch.
Meaning inquiry
Like many of her counterparts, Amira Darma is an ex-cop washed out by her job who has chosen to take a different path.
At the head (alone) of her agency, she can count on her former colleague Justin to bring her the few clients who allow her to pay her rent, without leading the high life. In short: a fairly classic protagonist of film noir, except that Amira does not smoke and that her body is not made up of 98% cheap whiskey.
The prologue, which some and some may have been able to try for free on Steam, invites us to meet three of the characters who make up the main frame of Chinatown Detective Agency.
The cynical matron who has more than one trick up her sleeve, the virtuous minister who wants to shed light on corruption, the two-faced loan shark… Not really altar boys, but the end justifies the means.
Badly oiled mechanics
Chinatown Detective Agency articulates its story around a common core from which several branches escape. In particular, there are additional surveys, some of which are optional, but which allow you to make a little money. And as we will see, this represents a significant aspect of the game.
If the title of General Interactive is certainly not a management game, you will need money to travel and solve your investigations. Indeed, the interface (rather invasive) offers you the possibility of going to several countries of the globe in order to carry out your investigations.
For example, you can visit a customer wishing to return a stamp from Manchuria to the Shanghai Philatelic Museum, or you can go to examine a childhood home in North America to get a recalcitrant suspect to talk. There are plenty of opportunities to blow up Amira's carbon footprint, so you'll end up feeling like you're spending more time waiting in the airport lobby than actually making progress on investigations.
It's a shame, because these are rather interesting. Quite varied, they mainly offer to solve puzzles that will ask you to play ALT + TAB on your browser to help you. And that's exactly what the game expects of you! He tells you, by the way. The interface compiles everything you need to know to progress and encourages you to ask for help if you get stuck on a puzzle.
JVFR
Find the origin of an ancestral dagger from its description, recognize the city where a stamp has been obliterated, decode Morse code... The challenges, rarely frustrating, will require you to rack your brains to advance in your investigations.
lost in translation
The problem is that Chinatown Detective Agency relies on an irritating backup system. Indeed, you have the possibility of failing, for example if you cannot decode a message which gives you an appointment at such a place in the allotted time. In which case, the game sends you back to the very beginning of the investigation. And you will have no choice but to retype all the dialogues you have already heard, all the travels that this entails and all the rest.
And it would be less serious if, sometimes, our failure was not simply due to a translation error! Explanation: very quickly in the game, we are asked to find the author of a quote. The downside is that the translation is absolutely not signed by the same person as the original. It is therefore impossible to progress without replaying the game in English, doing a search on the original terms of the quotation and typing the name of its author in the search engine of the game.
An unforgivable error, even though it is particularly impressive for such a small studio to offer a translation into several languages, while having already spent a lot of money to dub almost all the characters in the game.
JVFR
Taken hostage
On the point of dubbing, we also regret a cruel lack of finishes and quality control. Often, the soundscape of a scene follows us as we simply return to the office. To solve the problem ? You have to restart the game.
Let's also go over characters who suddenly stop talking, or lines of dialogue that have nothing to do with sauerkraut. It's starting to weigh heavily on the shoulders of the game!
It's all the more unfortunate that Chinatown Detective Agency has its moments of bravery, a few small sequences that work well, that hook us and engage us. But these are only suspended, fleeting moments, quickly driven out by the reality of General Interactive's game.
JVFR
Enjoying a healthy replayability, Chinatown Detective Agency takes us hostage. Once the prologue is over (already count a good hour), you will be asked to make a choice that will determine the rest of the adventure. And the only opportunity to see what is hidden behind the proposals that you reject will be to redo a game, and therefore to retype the prologue (unless you think about making a backup of your local files).
In any case, and this is perhaps the most unfortunate in history, the length of Chinatown Detective Agency irritates us and does not really make us want to know what we missed by choosing to work for such a character rather than 'another.
Chinatown Detective Agency : l'avis de JVFR
While we were rather excited by its prologue and its latest trailers, Chinatown Detective Agency leaves us with a bitter taste. If the various investigations offered are engaging, and the puzzles often exciting to solve, General Interactive's game suffers from a major lack of finishes which pulls it dangerously down.
Admittedly, the game is fully translated into Spanish, but the localization is so frumpy that you will sometimes have to switch the game to English to grasp the meaning of a sentence that will get you out of a bad situation.
Add to that a very wobbly technique (particularly on the sound design) and a writing that serves us well, and we get a rather disappointing result, even if it can keep you busy for an afternoon when you won't know what to do to take care of you.
To choose, prefer the captivating Backbone which, if it is less varied in its approaches, is much less bumpy.
Chinatown Detective Agency5
Chinatown Detective Agency will appeal to those whose absence of Carmen Sandiego weighs heavily on their little hearts. But General Interactive's game lacks finishing touches and suffers from numerous problems that prevent us from fully adhering to its proposal.Most
- A seductive aesthetic
- Engaging puzzles that mobilize us "offside"
- Fully lined
- Successful sound design...
- Good replayability...
The lessers
- School scenario
- Some artificial mechanics
- An inaccurate translation that blocks some puzzles
- ...when it's not bugging
- ... even if the game takes us hostage
