Released a week ago to absolutely no fanfare whatsoever, Unsolved Crimes is a neat detective sim which doesn’t deserve to go unnoticed. It’s far from perfect, and appears to have been made on a budget of tuppence, but it spins a series of solid and enjoyable cases around a central story involving your female partner Macy’s missing sister, a model called Betsy Blake.

We’re in Seventies Noo Yoik, and there are a series of murders to be sorted out while Macy frets about her sis. In each of these smaller cases, you’ll be sent to a crime scene with a few bits of info and usually statements from and info about three or four suspects. Once you’ve reached the scene it’s a case of doing your best David Caruso impression - before realising a zinger and a walk off camera isn’t going to cut it and you get down to some crime scene investigation, touchscreen style.

You move around with the d-pad, and use the stylus to rotate the view and to raise or lower the camera. It’s a little clunkier than it needs to be, but it’s satisfying when you duck down under a desk to find that piece of evidence that everyone else has missed. During your investigation, Macy asks you several questions, which form ‘queries’ - solve these and you’ll likely increase your ranking at the end of the case, with stars taken away for wrong answers and added on for particularly skilful pieces of deduction. Get enough clues and you’ll report back to your boss, before returning to pick up more evidence. It’s often possible to get most if not all key items and observations out of the way on your first trip, making return journeys a little pointless - you’ll just stand there until you’ve answered Marcy’s riddles and then hotfoot it back out, but it’s nice to think you’re one step ahead of the game. You even get the chance to finger a suspect early on if you’ve a hunch they did it - it’s unclear whether you get a points bonus for your educated guess being right when you’ve uncovered the real murderer, but again it’s satisfying to say you were right all along.

The cases are pretty short, but there are plenty of them, and quite a few throw in new ingredients to keep you on your toes - you might have to spray luminol to find blood traces, or fill in the missing details on a rather vague map. Between cases, when you’re chasing the leads in the Betsy Blake kidnapping, there are even a couple of action sequences to add variety, though in truth these are pretty woeful - particularly the final escape through a mazy underground area which is about to collapse.

It’s clearly been made on a shoestring, though there’s a certain charm to Marcy’s strange poses and the chief’s forced smile. The 3D crime scenes are pretty decent, and the sound is genuinely excellent, with wailing sirens and radio chatter among the many spot effects adding to the atmosphere, alongside a bit of Shaft-esque wacka-wacka guitar and cheesy muzak that perfectly evokes the era. The stories often come up with red herrings to throw you off the scent, while one or two late surprises will ruin your hunches. Sometimes it seems a little unfair in the occasional late revelations, and one or two occasions where you have to provide multiple pieces of evidence to back up your claims can feel unnecessarily exacting, punishing you with a star reduction when you miss something not immediately obvious.

Quibbles aside, this quirky and original little game definitely deserves a sequel with a bigger budget to make good on the promise shown here.

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This entry was posted on Monday, November 10th, 2008 at 5:53 pm by Chris Schilling
DS, Latest Games, Reviews.