Thank Hello, and welcome to The Back Page, a video games podcast. I’m Samuel Roberts, and I’m joined by Matthew Castle. Hello. Matthew, we’re joined by yet another special guest. Andy, do you want to introduce yourself? Hello, I’m Andy Kelly. I’m a Features Producer on PC Gamer, which is just a fancy way of saying I write stuff and do videos occasionally. Yeah, Andy, it’s lovely to have you. You’re a former colleague of both myself and Matthews, going back years, right? So why don’t you tell us a bit about your history in games media? Well, yeah, it’s quite a good time to look back, because LinkedIn just reminded me that as of like a couple of days ago, it’s my 17th year at Future Publishing, which was kind of scary seeing that written down and cold hard numbers. But I started when I was incredibly young. I was 17 when I applied, but I lied and said I was 18. But that was just because I was like worried they wouldn’t be like, you’re too young, but it was fine. Yeah, I started on PSM2 as it was at the time, which was a PlayStation 2 magazine, which really ages me, thinking I started when PlayStation 2 was a contemporary console. And from there, I moved to PSM3 for the next console generation and just kind of drifted around Future. I was part of like a thing called the Game Studio, which was just sort of like hired guns. Like if a magazine needed someone to write about a game, I would be there and another small team. And then ended up on PC Gamer. So that’s the whole trajectory, right? There are not many outlets really considering I’ve been there for almost 20 years. Yeah, for sure. It’s hardcore. So Andy’s joining us on this episode because it’s a Best Detective Games episode, which is prompted somewhat by the release of Famicom Detective Club. But also, Andy, I know it’s a subject that’s kind of close to your heart as well somewhat. In fact, I think when I was your editor on PC Gamer, you may even have written the Best Detective Games list while I was in charge. I think that rings a bell. Yeah, that list is still going and still being updated to this day. It’s because it’s my baby. Like I like to, whenever something new and detectively comes out, I jam it into that list, so it’s still there, still exists. Nice. Andy, in your days on PSM, what were they kind of like at the time? What was your sort of vibe on PlayStation in that moment? Were you kind of passionate about PS2 going into it? Yeah, PS2 was like, I mean, I used to be a Nintendo guy, and then I sold my N64 and bought PlayStation, and that was me. The lure of disc-based media and FMV and licensed music was too much to resist. I was full-on PS2 super fan when I joined PSM, so it was really like a dream just getting to sit and play PlayStation games and write about them and be in an office with a bunch of people, weirdly, who I’d been reading for like three years prior. So I’d gone from being a reader and getting to know these personalities to like sitting in an office with them, which was like really bizarre feeling, but like really exciting as well, especially for someone, you know, who never really left Glasgow where I grew up. I was suddenly in Bath with a job with all these people who are like pros and it was kind of overwhelming, but like extremely exciting. I have a very distinct memories of my brother being a PSM2 reader and I used to love the commentaries on the DVD because it used to be like all of you, right? Just in a room kind of talking over footage and I could never really decipher who was who, but you were definitely part of that crew. I mean, I was a fan of that. They were doing that a few years before me, or maybe like two years or something. So that was another cool thing, getting to then be a part of those commentaries. And it was really like proto YouTube. And people sat in a room and react into games. And it was just on an archaic format, like a DVD, but people loved them. And it was part of the reason I read the mag, because the cover DVD was great. Like the official mag had the demos, but it was all very polished and slick. I liked the kind of fanziny, but more rough and tumble feel of PSM and the sense of humor. And they weren’t as beholden to not being mean to Sony. Like it was all a bit more renegade. So yeah, the commentaries were part of that. They were great. And someone’s uploaded them all to YouTube. So they exist out there. Yeah. And it’s weird hearing, when I first moved to Bath, I had a really strong, thick, less weijian accent like Rabsi Nesbitt. So it’s weird hearing like this sort of timid, Scotch man on these commentaries. It was mainly like sort of 10 different people all called Dan being confused by Guilty Gear games. It’s sort of like my sort of memory of that period. I remember they were very like, if they didn’t know the game, if it was like, you know, which was generally Guilty Gear or Romance of the Three Kingdoms, they were very like dismissive. So when I came in, I tried to like bring a bit of like, nice people out there like these games. So I’m going to be the guy that like knows about them. So that was my contribution. But I did like, when I was a viewer, I did like picking the weirdest games on the DVD menu and knowing that you just hear like two minutes of wry cynicism, which is like entertaining, but not actually useful for in terms of a review. But that was another thing. It was just so preemptive to YouTube and streaming in a weird way. And as in personalities, looking at games and saying things about them. So that was cool to be a part of that. Even though I didn’t obviously reach as big an audience as some YouTubers, but I think I had a good crew watched it and wrote in and were really engaged with it. When it comes to the stuff that you were reading before you started working on PSM Andy, what were your sort of like, I guess not influences, but what did you actually like enjoy reading when you were getting into games? Well, I started, well, I used to be, like I said, I was a Nintendo guy. So I was obsessed with Total Nintendo, which was like the unofficial Nintendo magazine and also bought O&M the official mag as well. But I preferred Total and weirdly I would go on to work with one of the team members on Total and N64 magazine, Tim Weaver. That was another weird thing. At future I just kept seeing all these faces I used to see in sort of caricature form and old games mags suddenly sitting in front of me. So that never got old. So I just kind of went from those Nintendo mags and then started buying official PlayStation mag and just kind of, that was how I ended up at PSN. But yeah, I’ve read games mags as long as I can remember. Going back to, I bought the first issue of Games Master with 3D glasses, you know, like way back late 90s, maybe 98 or something. So it’s always been a thing. What I really liked about working with you is that I felt like, like you say, you’ve been doing it for 17 years, but you have this really sort of evergreen appreciation for games. Like you never kind of got cynical about games media writing. And I think a lot of people do when they end up kind of like leaving the industry and doing other stuff. What do you reckon sort of like behind that? What’s your sort of, I guess, your vibe on video games? I mean, I’ve seen a lot of writers. This makes me sound like an old man time. I’ve seen a lot of writers come and go who get kind of jaded by the industry, which is understandable because it’s quite an exhausting industry sometimes. But I just don’t really, I’m purely, this again sounds like these are terrible things I’m saying, but I’m in it for the games. Like I’m not interested in like the industry or the technology as much. I just like games and I like game design and I like that aspect of it. I rarely write about, I never write opinion pieces on the latest industry developments. I just write about games and fun things games do, interesting things games do. I don’t even really write many sort of negative opinion pieces because I feel like it’s a bit, I don’t know, I find it a bit boring. Just ragging on games when you could sort of celebrate them. I’d say I have very happy memories of the time. I guess it must have been when you guys had changed to PSM3 by the time I started. There was quite a long stretch where it would often be me, you and probably Rory on Games Master, like in the games cage, all playing kind of games next to each other. We had this kind of like cage where they kept all the TVs and consoles. And because we were all sort of staff writers or sort of section heads at the time, we were doing like quite a lot of playing in office. And it felt like we spent, even though we weren’t on the same mag, we never worked on the same mag. I feel like we kind of did work quite closely together in that weird little room. Yeah, I remember that cage. I was going to say fondly, but I just remember it. It was like a weird prison. But I always remember sitting playing, reviewing brown shooters on PS3 and looking over at you playing bizarre Japanese, like colorful Japanese cartoon games on the Wii would have been, or the GameCube. So I remember that yearning to be playing something colorful because the PS3 era was full of drab, a lot of drab brand games. I was often quite jealous of what you and Gamesmaster were playing. I remember quite clearly like you guys playing Just Cause 2 and thinking, oh, that looks fun. Flinging yourselves around the jungle. And also a lot of time you spent, or you did the PlayStation Home column and watching you be generally unhappy in PlayStation Home was another kind of lasting impression. Yeah, they wouldn’t let that column go. I sort of suggested in a meeting once on PSN3 that I should do like Vox Pops and PlayStation Home. And that just turned into like over a year of writing a column every month and trying to find something interesting. But the people in PlayStation Home were so unengaged. They just went in there to like get free Warhawk hats and stand around in silence. So I was running around like trying to eke some kind of entertainment. And a lot of those columns, I just made stuff up. People were saying because like I was going around asking questions and trying to get something out of them. It was getting nothing back. So that’s why a lot of my time at PlayStation Home was quite miserable. But I look back on it as a weirdly interesting bit of like Sony history. It was just like a really rubbish 3D chat room that was just so corporate and like, and there’s just like floating adverts everywhere and stuff. It was just so soulless and bizarre. Yeah, what a strange thing. It was something we talked about in this podcast a lot, Andy, is the PS3 generally and what kind of odd time that was for Sony. What was your sort of vibe on covering the PSM3 as PSM2 became PSM3? I’ve admitted, I’ve said this before and some PSM readers have been slightly taken aback, but I really did not like PlayStation 3. I felt like we got the worst versions of multi-format games. So I was constantly playing blurrier versions of games. Rory on Games Master was playing on an Xbox 360. It looked and ran a lot better. The hardware was an absolute nightmare to update the firmware. Updates, game updates took forever, whereas they were like instantaneous on Xbox. I think Microsoft had some like file size limit. So an update would be like 500 kilobytes on Xbox 360 and on PlayStation 3, I’d be plugging in USB sticks or downloading off early internet, earlyish internet, like really big updates. So like that, the hardware, I just think it’s an ugly looking console, so heavy and cumbersome and I’ve got no, I really don’t have any love for the PS3, like looking back, but I enjoyed writing about it. Obviously I did it for so many years because it was still writing about games, which is my main thing. But whenever I went home, I was full on Xbox 360 all the way. Like I used to love coming back and playing games on Xbox 360 and looking better and running better and just the Blades dashboard being a lot nicer to use. And so yeah, I was like a secret Xbox guy posing as a PlayStation writer. From there though, Andy, you move on to PC Gamer. Is PC a bit more of your natural home these days in terms of the types of stuff that you’re playing on there? Yeah, I started as a PC Gamer before I even had a console. We got like a Pentium 2 PC and had onboard graphics and no 3D accelerator, but I tried and played as much stuff I could on there. So lots of games that ran in software mode, like Carmageddon and isometric 2D RPGs, like Baldur’s Gate and all that kind of thing, and adventure games as well, which I was obsessed with LucasArts adventures and stuff. So I was always a PC Gamer, but couldn’t afford a PC. After that Pentium 2 became woefully outdated, the idea of buying a new PC was out of the question. So I just moved to consoles. And so when I finally got a gaming PC and then started on PC Gamer, I felt like it was a bit of a homecoming. Like it’s what I always wanted to be a part of the PC thing, but just was always sort of monetarily stuck with consoles. So yeah, if it was like, this is why, this is the format that’s like right for me, I think now. I don’t even, I don’t only have a PS4 that I just watch Blu-rays on. So. Yeah, there’s basically like eight games a generation that you need to play on PS4 and everything else can just be on PC. That’s kind of like the vibe these days of games, isn’t it? Andy, I was curious if you wanted to talk a little bit about how you think games media has changed in the time you’ve been doing it. It feels like a lot of generations of writers have kind of come and gone, again, I’m making you sound like old man time here. That’s not my intention. But what has changed in that time, do you think? Well, I think the internet has obviously completely changed the approach to coming up with ideas and stuff. Like on PSM early days, it used to be go in the meeting room and sit with five people if you were lucky. For the most part, just a small group of people in a room who all know each other’s sense of humor and tastes quite intimately. Just coming up with, apart from the cover would always be commercially slanted because you want to sell copies, but everything inside was a bit of a wild west. It was just, what do we find interesting? Whereas now it’s more, from my experience, mainly working online now, not so much magazines, although I still do write for PC Gamer, the print edition, but it’s more steered by, I mean, I still write what I find interesting, but a lot of it is thinking about headlines in different ways to make people click on the interesting stuff, rather than just putting it out there in a magazine. It used to be, even more so before I started, but when I started, it was still very much a boys’ club with very lads’ Maggie humor. Some of the stuff in the old PSMs, I was leafing through some recently. I was like, oh, you could not print that today. Like nothing, you know, not like full of racism, but just like a bit kind of iffy tone-wise. So that is a massive change now. There’s like more voices than ever writing about games and it really wasn’t like that. It was lots of very similar men writing about games back then like 15 years ago. So, and like with stuff like Twitch and YouTube now, like the voice of the etching words into stone with a chisel types is sort of diminished a bit where people don’t, there’s more places to look now. If you want to know about a game, you can watch someone playing it on Twitch. Some personality you like, maybe people aren’t as interested, some people aren’t as interested in like more traditional written criticism and stuff. So yeah, it’s definitely now between when I started in 2004, I think it was, it couldn’t be more different really. Yeah, it’s funny, even today when Mass Effect, the Legendary Edition trilogy is the embargo just started lifting. And I think that the streaming embargo lifted before any of the websites covered it. And that feels like a sign of the times that they’re like comfortable with people showing the game publicly in that way before people write about it. Yeah, really shows how things have changed I think. In terms of like the other stuff that you kind of get up to Andy you, what’s the current status of other places, your video channel, do you want to talk a little bit about that? Yeah, that was my main sort of side gig for a couple of years, like three years. I was briefly on Patreon with it and was being funded there and just doing it in my spare time. It’s for anyone that doesn’t know it’s like kind of atmospheric short films, all shot inside video games, set to music and with no characters. So it’s kind of like playing in game environments speak for themselves kind of thing. And I really enjoyed doing it, but I got kind of burned out on the concept. I did something like 78 videos there, which is, and every one is like a huge amount of work hacking the camera, taking all the footage, editing it to the music and everything. And it was just a huge amount of work and I just got burned out on it. So I’ve not done one for a year. Occasionally I’d dip back in and I did a Yakuza 01 just because I really liked that environment. But yes, it’s kind of just on hiatus now. I think when the right game comes along, I’ll do another one. But yeah, it’s been almost exactly a year since I did a Red Dead Redemption 2 one. But yeah, it’s just, I feel like I just bled that idea dry. There’s only so many ponderous shots of virtual mountains that you can look at before the idea was thin. Okay, fair enough. That sounds like a withering YouTube comment that someone would leave on your videos. Except it’s the creator saying it. So yeah, other than that, you made a game and released it on Itch last year, right? What was that like? Have you been dabbling a bit with making a game over the years? Yeah, that was only a couple of months ago, actually. I’ve been using a tool called Bitsy, which is like a really accessible game making tool where you can just make… The idea is that you make a tiny little world just to be in. You can move characters around, pick stuff up, dialogue boxes. And I just I thought I’d try and push that limited system with its very limited color palette and small amount of pixels and try to make like a sort of sci-fi alien inspired horror game. So that was quite fun. And it got quite a good reaction. I feel like I squeezed more out of that engine than I’ve seen a lot of people doing. Tried to make something a bit more epic. But that’s… I’m kind of still interested in Bitsy, but I tend to like drift away from things that I get really intensely into and then shift on to something else. I think I’m in that transition phase now looking for the next ludicrous time sync of a creative project to lose myself in. Yes, men with side projects, I think it’s called. Basically, that’s like every single person I know has that kind of cycle with the stuff they’re interested in. It’s even worse now with the pandemic and just finding new ways to avoid gazing into the abyss. It’s like, what can I distract myself with now? Oh, I’ll buy a synthesizer. Oh, I’ll learn how to play the bass. I’ll do this. It’s just like hobbies have gotten out of hand at the moment. I think you’ve got quite a good track record, though, of actually like surfacing your creative projects. Like, you tend to get something out of it that you can then, you know, you put online and people can see and enjoy, you know, I thought you’ve got a, you seem to me like highly productive. Yeah, it takes a while. That bitsy game I released two months ago, I started before the pandemic. So it just, things will linger and I’ll just get touchy whilst I sit in there unposted. So I’ll just finish it. I can post it and move on with my life. I just delete everything in shame. I get halfway through it and I’m like, oh, I still have the old bollocks. And I’ve been it off because I haven’t made Red Dead 2 in Twine. I do that as well. I’ve got so many binned projects and half started projects that so the things that do surface are like one tiny bubble escaping from a vast lake of failure. So yeah, that game is called Entity for people who want to download it, by the way. I also can’t believe that was only two months ago, Andy. I think that just speaks to how fucking warped time is in the pandemic. Well, in that case, then thanks so much for talking about your background, Andy. We’ll take a short break and then we’ll come back and get into the subject of detective games some more. Welcome back, so in this episode, we’re talking about detective games. We’re gonna talk a bit about what makes a great detective game in this section, and what also kind of impairs a detective game from reaching its full potential. We’ve got a bunch of stuff to go over here, but I thought we’d start, Matthew, with Famicom Detective Club, which is releasing, I think it’s actually, as we’re recording this, about to release, but when people are listening to this. Yeah, it’ll have been out for about a week by the time you hear this. Yeah, so this is an obscure, but kind of well-documented collection of NES visual novels that have never released in the West, right? They’ve been fan-translated before, and I’ve heard them talked about in places like Retronauts, but what’s the kind of deal with these, and this kind of Switch re-release, is it kind of worth picking up? You know, it’s kind of a bit of a deep Nintendo cut that people didn’t expect to see, so that’s kind of exciting in itself, whenever Nintendo go into the archives like this. I’ve also said they’ve done an absolutely amazing job of actually updating them. They gave them to a company called Majors, who made the Steins Gate visual novels. So they’ve got quite a good track record, but I’d say even by their usual standards, these are sort of exceptionally well-produced things. I mean, I really think by visual novel standards, or the ones I’ve played, they sort of feel a bit more kind of AAA, kind of within that space, if that makes sense. You know, they’re really, really well animated. There’s a lot of sort of side detail to them. They’ve, you know, completely redone all the music. There’s just a lot more kind of going in them. It’s not just static art. It’s, there’s a real sort of sense of like life in it. But I will say they do feel like games from 1988 and 1989, which is where the pair of them come from. Like they’re very, very old fashioned visual novels. They’re very much the first attempt from the industry. Narratively, I’d also say that they’re quite basic. I don’t know if that’s because at the time, the genre, the medium was in his infancy and storytelling hadn’t matured. They’re quite simple and they haven’t really done much to disguise that. Like it kind of feels warts and all in terms of localization. Nintendo haven’t done like a big pass on this and punched it up. It doesn’t, it doesn’t like read like an ace attorney, so it’s very sort of straight into the point. As an actual detective game, like there’s not much detecting in it. It’s very much a visual novel. You just sort of move through it, talking to characters, the story naturally moves itself along. I think there’s probably only like three or four moments in each game where you actually do anything to further the plot or that you’re called upon to kind of dip into what you know. Probably what we’re going to talk about in a moment is there are so many interesting detective games these days that these feel kind of old as hell. Yeah, so I kind of got the impression that might happen just from the kind of reveal that they did, but they did look very nice, like you say. Yeah, I kind of expected this not to be Phoenix Wright in terms of complexity. So there’s no sort of gathering clues and stuff in this game. It’s more just like talking to people. Yeah, you sort of talk to people to kind of move conversations along. And the weird thing with it is everything’s controlled with like a sort of verb sheet. So you click talk and then you click on the name of the character you want to talk to. There are some other sort of quite vague verbs, like think or remember. And sometimes you have to sort of talk to someone and then think about that person to kind of further the plot. So, and it doesn’t ever really explain that. It really does feel like just total trial and error. Like you’re just going through doing every combination of words on other words. And it’s like an even more abstract version of what you used to do with inventories and point and click games. So you just combine every item and every other item. You know, here it’s just words. It’s very flat. Every time you hit a wrong answer or every time the story isn’t furthering, the character will just grunt. So there are literally scenes where you hear a character just grunt like a hundred times until you do what you need to do. I’m kind of amazed no one at Nintendo thought, you know what, we should probably put in some queue lines here, you know, on the big sticking points because this feels old as hell and not very pleasant to play. And I don’t think it would have taken much to have added a couple of lines just prompting you because the sticking points when they come are horrible. There’s one where, you know, you have to ask a question and you get the answer. And then you ask again and you get the same answer and you just have to keep asking them until they say something different. How the fuck are you meant to know that? That’s unbelievable. You know, that’s really ancient design. It’s kind of honking in that regard, which is a shame because it’s so beautiful. And like as a Nintendo completist, you think, yeah, I kind of want this in my collection. That’s kind of a shame. Andy, is this on your radar at all? You don’t own a Switch, right? So did these games sort of cross your sort of path at all? Yeah, I do have a Switch actually. Yeah, I’ve been playing like quite a lot of Switch lately, I think, and I got a Lite, so I’m purely a handheld Switcher. I’ve been playing Phoenix Wright Trilogy on it, which is just a perfect fit for a handheld console. I’ve been able to dip in and out and they look so crisp and nice on that screen. So yeah, I’ve been eyeing this one up and I did suspect it would feel quite archaic and 80s. And also the 60 quid price point makes my head spin a little bit. So I’ll wait for that to maybe go on sale in like five years or whatever. They are like, there’s odd moments you think, oh, this has got a bit of that sort of seeing magic in that they’re quite old fashioned. Like the stories are quite low key in a way that I like. One’s an inheritance dispute, like another’s a missing person. It’s set in the 80s. It’s sort of set in quite normal houses and offices. It does the idea of like a more muted realistic set and does appeal actually, especially a Japanese one. Like, yeah, I like kind of slice of life Japanese stuff in general. Whereas Phoenix Wright is great in one of my favorite games, but it’s so like zany sometimes. It gets in the way of the like detecting a bit sometimes. You want something a bit more grounded to get your teeth into. At its best, I say Famicom Detective Club reminds me a bit of, you’ve got this like new wave of anime films, which are quite like muted. Things like Your Name, they’re animated, but they aren’t like amazing fantasy vistas, you know, Ala Miyazaki or anything. They’re kind of, they’re set in like regular apartments and the artists have drawn kind of really tatty microwaves and things. And it’s very satisfying to see someone animate like an old microwave. And this has kind of got that sort of energy too. That sounds a bit like, that’s something I like about Yakuza is that you spend a lot of your time in like really like quite drab, dreary, like real estate offices and stuff like that. Yeah, because more games, I mean, most games don’t let you just exist in like a kind of relatable place. It’s always exaggerated or amplified in some way. So when you see that in a game, I think for me, it really appeals. Yeah, yeah. Well, if you want to see like an empty car park, this game’s got quite a few of them. And you’d be like, yeah, that sure is a boring empty car park. But I kind of like that. Yeah, I think I might actually, I might splash out in this, actually. I think I’ve got some. Oh my God. I can’t believe I won you over with a car park talk. I know it really has. Like I saw some art, a key art, and thought it had some like supernaturally looking stuff. But I must have just misread that. So the idea that it’s more realistic. The second game’s kind of got this sort of strand to it about like an urban legend about a haunted school. So the whole thing is like, is it supernatural? Isn’t it supernatural? But the first game’s very like, very chilled and relaxed. They set out in a kind of countryside and it’s mostly kind of the sound of like crickets and wind blowing and everything. It’s quite relaxing. I’ll give it that. Yeah, I think I’m going to pick it up. I’ve got some trips coming up and like, it’s ideal for being isolated somewhere and have a little mystery in your Switch. It’s actually like a surprise that the Switch hasn’t really hosted more of these games. It feels like it’s still the, weirdly an area where the PS Vita kind of rules. I wonder if that will change over time. There’s some good like story led games on Switch I’ve been playing like Tango Tower is a good fun detective game and it’s got really nice art that’s on Switch and Over the Alps as well, which is like a kind of Wes Anderson looking spy thriller set in Austria, like in the eve of World War Two. And that’s like all text based and has some detective elements. So there’s some like good sort of low key sort of slightly more relaxed Switch games in that regard. They’re about to bring the silver case on to there as well, right? The Suda game. But Andy, I remember you not being that keen on that when you played it for PCG, is that right? Yeah, I remember I think we couldn’t get code or something. So I just bought it and then I remember refunding it. I just found it absolutely willfully not like baffling and weird in an interesting way, just in like a willfully, aggressively, how weird and off-putting can we be way I did not like it. So I suppose then in terms of like what the two of you for what your idea of a great detective story looks like, Andy, if we start with you, to you, what do you sort of look for in terms of settings or types of characters, types of stories when it comes to detective fiction? Yeah, well, I’m fully in love with 1940s Los Angeles, weary detective thing, but like not so much the kind of slightly annoying, like parody way that people present that setting. But like I read a lot, I read a lot of books from the period and watch a lot of films from the period. And like I really love that setting and era. So anything set in like 40s slash 50s in America with a lot of weary sad characters, but not like in an exaggerated comedy film, Huawei, that’s kind of my sweet spot for detective stories. And in terms of stuff you’ve enjoyed, like in the last few years, what have you been kind of like reading or watching that has captured your attention on that front? I basically I bought every Raymond Chandler book, and I read them all, which took a long time, but I read them all in order and got fully immersed in that. And I read a bunch of James Elroy, his LA quartet, and watched a lot of period film noir. So like that, I had like a really deep period of getting into that stuff. But I mean, outside of that, I watched a lot of Poirot. I got the Poirot box set for my birthday, which is like something wild, like 18 discs of just sheer Poirot, and I got really madly into that, like watching one every other night and getting really into that kind of agatha Christie vibe. But other than that, I think most of my detecting stuff is video games. That makes sense. What about you, Matthew? Your specialty is more Japanese crime fiction, right? Yeah, recently, I kind of go through big phases with things. But this is like one of the longest lasting phases. For about three years, I’ve been just sort of like destroying any Japanese crime fiction I can get my hands on. It feels like it’s a bit of a growing industry as well, which is good. You know, it feels like kind of where ten years ago you had the sudden kind of spurt of Scandinoir. It feels like you’ve suddenly got there in that there’s a lot of like Japanese, Chinese, Korean fiction being in translation, which is good because like I’ve like genuinely exhausted, you know, what is readily available and now have like Catherine imports stuff like ex-school library copies from America of things that were printed in the 80s, so I’ve got these quite tatty kind of translations which aren’t available in the UK. They’re very different, like they’re a really different vibe to that kind of like 1940s thing. I mean, they’re not really like character pieces, like they’re super pure about like the mystery and the mechanics of the mysteries. They’re often like impossible crimes or locked-room crimes. The detectives, they’re not like, at least in translation and to my eye, are not like amazingly charismatic, you know, they are series characters, so, you know, authors have detectives who keep returning, but there’s no one like, you know, Poirot, you know, or the film noir kind of private eyes, they’re just about like the puzzle element of it, which some people find a bit sparse and like a bit hard to get into. I think there’s a game element to that, you know, it’s kind of, can you solve these quite kind of sort of strange puzzles, you know, and that’s very much a vibe which gets carried into like Ace Attorney and Danganronpa and there are, you know, Japanese developers, I think, grew up on this stuff as well and have kind of incorporated it into their games, so yeah, it kind of all makes sense that I’m generally into that stuff, but I need to read more of the classic detectives. I love James Elroy, but I actually haven’t read any Chandler, which is shocking. It’s kind of the opposite of these pristinely presented Japanese mysteries you’re talking about, whereas a lot of Raymond Chandler stories and stories from that era by the writers at admission don’t make sense or there’s plot holes or like the mystery isn’t really that important. As much as the scene setting and introspection of the character, like you often finish and like sort of the mystery won’t have really wrapped up in a really satisfying way. Like everyone will be, you know, out of pocket or dead or sad and it will just kind of fizzle out. Whereas, yeah, these books you describe and send a lot more about like constructing a really beautifully presented and satisfying riddle to solve. Yeah, and some people are into it. Like I give them some people and they dig that thing. Other people feel like the whole book exists just to serve the kind of reveal at the end. So it doesn’t necessarily like stand alone as a like an interesting piece of fiction. You know, they’re not necessarily things you can reread. You know, there are definite exceptions and like what’s interesting in like Japanese crime writing anyway, is that, you know, they’re, you know, you have this kind of tradition 100 years ago for this very kind of like, like you say, sort of riddle crime construction mysteries. And then they kind of reject that and you almost get a kind of Chandler ish resurgence in Japan of private eyes and tired detectives and people who just kind of that, you know, there’s a there’s a guy called Inspector Imanishi. And he’s his whole thing is he’s like, he always sort of waits, he’s he’s always waiting to interview people kind of constructing higher cues about, like, you know, whatever scene he happens to be looking at the time. And they’re much more kind of like mood pieces. You should try check some of those out. I think you dig them, Andy. They sound more like you’re kind of Yeah, that sounds that sounds awesome. Is there any like a lot of these books? Or is it like a Yeah, there’s a couple. The authors called the author of those particular ones called Seichi Matsumoto. Yeah, they’re much more like down to earth kind of regular things. And then, you know, you come forward like in the 80s, you know, you then get the resurgence of the old style kind of reacting to that saying, no, it’s all about, you know, kind of crime as maths problem. And what’s great about detective games is that there are so many different genres of detective story and a lot of them seem catered for by games, which is quite cool. What do you think makes a great detective game, Matthew? It depends what you want. Like there are there are like lots. I was looking at basically across all the games I like, and I kind of like them all for very different reasons. You know, there are some which are just like good classic stories, like they’re good mysteries. They just they work, you know, on a purely narrative level. Then I think you’ve got more modern games which are maybe doing more interesting things like mechanically to try and like recreate the kind of vibe of being a detective. And then I think you have stories which are like just pure escapism and like games that kind of make you feel like how cool it must be to be a detective, you know, something like LA Noire, for example, that that game had a big effect on me just the like driving up to a crime scene and there’s all the members of the public being held back, but you get to go in and it’s quite exciting. It’s quite a good drama to that, I think. What about you, Andy? Is that the same thing for you where there’s like almost these branches of different detective games? Some are about pure narrative, others are more about the mechanics. Yeah, I think I went for a period of like being really hardline, like a detective game must let me do detecting and have interesting systems that support that. But that was kind of a brief period. Now I just, I’m happy just to be told a story and to experience a mystery in a kind of interactive way and just, you know, having had a reveal at the end is satisfying. Whether that’s just clicking through a text in a visual novel is fine. But also, if that involves lots of piecing together clues, then that’s also good. Like I’m pretty, I think I’m pretty flexible. Are you into detective games, Sam? I somewhat. The reason I’m kind of like asking you two about it is it’s not a genre I feel like I know that well. So I sort of envy your interest in Japanese crime fiction, Matthew, because you’ve gotten so deep into it, you’re like a genuine expert. And you’ve you’ve kind of like shown diagrams from the books that do allow you to piece the mystery together, which I find really interesting, because I’ve read one Elroy book that was about Dahlia, and I really liked it. But it felt like it was more about immersing you in the time period than it was. And also like the themes of the time period, rather than it was about solving the mystery, which you could never really solve by yourself. Like the book doesn’t give you the clues to do it. But that’s what I like. I think when you play a lot of modern detective games, you can sense, you know, almost what influences different people are into, you know, like LA Noire is so clearly, it’s just like Elroy all the way. But then you play Ace Attorney or Danganronpa or whatever, and you get a bit more of that kind of like weird kind of locked room stuff. Andy, I think you like me are quite into the Sherlock Holmes games. Yeah, yeah. One of the one of those is quite high on my list of all time favorite detective games here. So I was going to say the hit and miss, but from my experience is like one big hit and a lot of misses like this. I think those games are like really good example of having both a satisfying mystery and a really nice sets of place but also systems that let you mess up and accuse the wrong person, which is like really bold of that game. Like not many detective games let you screw up the case and then choose not to know if you got it wrong. That’s the really important thing. At the end, it will say, do you want to know if you accuse the right person? And I always say, no, let me just live with the choice I made. And you know, I could have got it wrong, but I don’t know. And I like that. Not knowing. I don’t think any other game has has done that. That game, if there’s crimes and punishments. Yeah, crimes and punishments. Yeah, that’s that’s the one good one. That’s got the hilarious moments where you can like not only, you know, accuse multiple people, but you can then like, you can either like hand them into the police or not hand them it. You can basically like forgive them. So you can basically get it wrong and then forgive them. And I always think that person must think like, oh shit, he thinks it’s me. Oh, but he’s forgiven me. So it doesn’t matter. It must be quite a strange sort of fit, sort of emotional roller coaster to have, oh, thanks for letting me go. And I didn’t do it, but you know, cheers anyway. You’ve got London’s most notorious, famous, you know, detective known for being a genius, you know, get getting it wrong. And you’re the only person that knows actually Sherlock doesn’t know what he’s doing. I suppose on that subject, then, if that is a game that gets it right, like what, what is it that detective games can get wrong? What are the points of frustration? Do you think? Maybe I don’t mind visual novel style detective games, where it’s a lot of text, but any that don’t let you do anything, like not even the illusion of making decisions or finding things. If it’s all just presented that in a really neat way, where you don’t have to think about anything, I think that’s where it falls apart. And I guess you could say that for any kind of detective fiction game or otherwise. If a film, if the mysteries just has no complexity or winding paths or makes you, you know, red herrings, it’s kind of boring. So I think that I’ve not really played many detective games that really are like that. But I think the less you have to do, the less satisfying it is as a detective game. Yeah, I’d say a lot of the problems are just more like wider problems with crime writing, you know, like just a bad story is a bad story. Like, weirdly, like Ace Attorney, even though I really, really rate them and I really like them, often they commit one of the kind of cardinal sins that it’s quite easy to get ahead of it. And you kind of work it all out. And that’s, that’s, you know, there’s no sort of surprise at the end of a lot of the cases because they’re quite easy to get ahead of. But I think there it’s okay, because then it becomes about, like, trying to break down the villain, you know, there’s kind of an obvious villain of the piece that you’re trying to kind of whittle down with the testimony and that in itself is really satisfying. But there have definitely been other games where I think, oh, you know, I know, I know what I’m doing, you know, it feels like you’re working towards something you’re like two hours ahead of the game. That can be a flaw. But that’s a problem with books as well. Like, if I’m reading a book and I work out who done it and it is that person, I’m always kind of secretly disappointed. How often in these Japanese books do you guess who done it? Sometimes it really depends from author to author because there’s the one I’m terrible at. There’s a guy called Soji Shimada, who wrote the Tokyo Zodiac Murders and the Crooked House, Murder in the Crooked House. And the Murder in the Crooked House is truly preposterous. It plays fair, it lays out all the information, but there’s bits in the story where it gives you very precise dimensions of rooms and you think, hmm, why do I need these specific numbers? And it really does come down to certain numbers adding up in a certain way, which is just a little bit too technical for my liking, I think. I enjoy the… that one I enjoyed the kind of… the mystery was so sort of strange that I enjoyed trying to guess and work it out, but actually in the end it was like, I didn’t come anywhere near so I felt kind of thick and stupid. And I guess games don’t want to ever leave you feeling that way. The balance or the kind of conflict at the heart of detective games is being difficult enough to satisfy, but not… but not so difficult that you can’t do it. And I’d say like generally people kind of lean maybe a bit easy with them. I would say in terms of that specific sub-genre of Japanese crime novels that you read, Matthew, has any game captured their essence quite well, do you think? Some of the cases, you know, to keep coming back to Ace Attorney Danganronpa are, you know, they could be like in those books. Some of the mad stuff. Less so the early Ace Attorneys, like weirdly, Shootakimi’s stuff is a bit gentler on that front. It’s more when the other guys come in, like the Miles Edgeworth games, that the actual murders in those games are often a little bit more complicated and often involve like, not like murder machines, but there’s always moving parts that kind of, if all this stuff happens at a very precise point in time, you can murder someone in this quite unlikely way. And that feels quite true. And that’s the same in Danganronpa as well. So I interviewed the developer of the Danganronpa series once and he was, yeah, you know, he put his hand up saying, yeah, I’m heavily influenced by these authors. They’re almost so tangled that they’re kind of, you couldn’t do like an Obra Dinn style game with those murder machines because they’re so hard to put, you know, visually they’d be impossible to like pass. That’s interesting. I suppose then Andy, for you, what do you wish Detective Games did more of? It’s more of a personal taste thing, but I’d like more, I mean, speaking of Famicom Detective Club, I’d like to see developers leaning less on sort of gimmicky sci-fi or fantasy or like magic detective goggles that let you see holograms and, you know, recreate the crime scene Batman Arkham style and that kind of like just less gimmicks and like more forensic or like realistic clue hunting and like using your brain and kind of more subdued settings because I feel like when I hear about like a new detective game and it goes out set in like a fantasy realm of gods and demons, I’m like, yeah, that that’s unnecessary. Like just set, you know, set the mystery somewhere that doesn’t distract from like the core story, which is the interesting thing. And murders like pretty spicy as it is, you know, you don’t also need a fucking dragon to make murder cool or not cool, you know, commiserations to the murdered. And I agree, I’m actually surprised, given like how many police procedures there are on TV that go into like every, you know, discipline of police work, it’s kind of surprising how few of them have been represented in games. There aren’t many games that go big on like forensics, or like forensic pathology, or the one that really stands out to me is like how no games, you know, outside of LA Noire has really like attempted like the like proper interrogation and the kind of drama of the interrogation room, which feels like quite a big pop culture thing because of like Line of Duty, you know, famously has these half an hour interrogation scenes. I’m kind of amazed no one’s done something like more complicated with that. And it’s not like a technical limitation because there’s so many great tools for dialogue now, like ink and stuff like that, where you can, you could write really interesting branching interrogations that can fly off in different directions. So I wonder what the reticence is there if it’s not a technical thing. Is it just, maybe they don’t think gamers will want to sit for half an hour and watch to a detective and a sweaty man go and add it in a dimly lit room. Yeah, I sometimes wonder if it’s a sense of like, some of these detective games, like they work towards this like absolute truth being the kind of the win, you know, that’s what happens at the Ace Attorney, like you 100% nail them on it. Where, you know, I wonder if like actual police work is a bit more kind of hit and miss and you just kind of wear people down and you kind of have to take all these like half victories and maybe it’s like maybe if you actually did it properly, it would just be really unsatisfying because you’d realise that how much of it is just like basically bartering people. And maybe it’s like down on police work because we’ve been rewatching The Wire recently and so much of The Wire is just like even when you’ve got a strong case it’s kind of dog shit and you basically have to like thump someone into where they’re guilty, which no one really wants to play. Yeah, is there anything else that you wish the Detective Games did more of these days Matthew other than more interrogation scenes? One problem I do have with Detective Games is that I don’t often have reason to like replay them. This might just be like, you know, if you write a great story, if you write a great mystery, you know, it has an ending or you’re working towards a fixed ending, it’s kind of hard to go back in and be sort of be amazed by it afresh. So you know, whether there’s a way of folding in more like emergent stuff or you get a bit of that with like what Sam Barlow does where it feels like it’s a little open to interpretation and kind of the route you take through the game will kind of change your perception of those characters. But I wonder if there’s a way of doing that, you know, on a bigger scale, I’m not saying like every time it should be a different person who’s done the murder, but I do find a lot of them are kind of quite one and done. Yeah, for sure. That makes sense. Andy, I was wondering what you’ve made of the Hitman Detective level later this, sorry, earlier this year, and whether you, you thought there was anything in that Dartmoor level that could be applied more broadly to like detective games? Yeah, I mean, that was a great level and I’d watched Knives out not long before it, and as I said, watch a lot of Pyro, so like it hit a lot of my current interests when I played it. But I didn’t, I felt like as a, I felt like a fun gimmick rather than like an example of like great, a great detective, like I like the story, but the actual finding clues and stuff was very much using 47’s Magic Vision and like sort of picking out, you know, like a book that opens a secret door and stuff. Like I felt like it was a beautiful piece of scene setting and mood, but like not necessarily like I didn’t feel like I should make a detective game, you know, it just felt like a fun like homage to the genre rather than like a really killer piece of like detective fiction. I guess it’s quite rare to see any detective story with those kinds of production values, which is why like LA Noire I think still like holds up and stands out as like, because they, because these stories kind of are like when and done by, you know, by definition, it’s quite a gamble to kind of go, oh, we’re going to have like a proper 3D world and it’s all going to be modeled and that environment in Hitman is amazing, like it is amazing walking around and going into the crime room and seeing everything and seeing all the body and everything and all the props and all the, you know, there’s a lot of interesting kind of storytelling in the environment. But in most people, like, I think there’s a reason detective games seem to exist mostly in, like, the indie space is because they’re probably quite hard to commit to financially. Yeah, that makes sense. And plus, yeah, but it’s that whole problem of you solve them once, then why would you replay it? And, you know, big publishers are more conscious than ever of, like, how do we keep you playing a game for, like, 100 hours or whatever. So it almost was like detective games flying in the face of that a little bit. Okay, good stuff. Well, that was, that was some good deep chat there about the genre. So we’ll take a short break then and we’ll come back with both Matthew and Andy’s top five favorite detective games. I’m going to be playing the game for the first time in a while. Whoever’s got like a game ranked higher, if there’s any kind of crossover, we’ll talk about it when we get to basically the highest ranking on the list. I made that sound really complicated, but it makes sense in practice. So Matthew, why don’t you kick off with your number five? So my first game is Last Window, The Secret of Cape West, the sequel to Hotel Dusk. Is that on your list, Andy? No, it’s not, but I do love Hotel Dusk. That’s… What a great game it is. Yeah, for me, this is not like mechanically a particularly interesting detective game, but this is 100% like the kind of the mood and sort of setting vibe that I think Andy was talking about with like the 1940s. Like it… For me, this story of Carl Hyde, who’s this kind of private investigator, in Hotel Dusk, the first game that goes to Hotel Dusk, and the whole story takes place there. In this one, he’s kind of coming back to his apartment building, and it’s sort of… Everyone’s basically got like a week until they’re going to move out for whatever reason. And so it’s kind of like there’s a mystery to be solved in the last week of this building. A lot of things stuff is massively like indebted to like US Noire and US pop culture. But sometimes it’s slightly kind of like… Not something’s lost in translation, but it kind of changes or it has… There’s kind of some sort of weirdness can seep in. But for my money, this was like the closest they ever did to that really nailing, that kind of 1940s. And Carl Hyde is just the classic kind of slightly kind of gruff detective. You know, he always looks like he’s sort of like huffing that he has to do anything in his little sort of illustration. And all the people he deals with are kind of slightly sort of, not sort of sad sacks, but they’re, you know, they’re all slightly tired looking and jowly and they’re not all like, it’s not a building full of like beautiful or like weird sort of anime characters. They, they feel quite normal. And you spend a lot of time just sort of hanging out with them and chatting in the diner with them. It’s like completely straight. There’s like no weird supernatural stuff. It’s not kind of, you know, Twin Peaks-y, which I think a lot of people tend to go with, with the kind of the Americana thing. It’s got this very like mellow vibe to it. The actual mystery is really not very interesting. But in terms of catching the private eye feel and what it’s like to kind of hang out with people, I thought this was pretty special. I think it’s like particularly potent because it’s the last game Sing made. It’s got this like weird air of finality about it because everyone’s moving out of this building. You know, it has the whole vibe of the games. You’ve got like one last shot to do something. And you know, which, you know, rather poetically is exactly what it is for Sing. I put this to them, actually, after we interviewed the head of Sing, like a few years after they shut down. And she was just like, nah, it’s a coincidence. So like my wanky theory is like nothing is exactly that. But I like to think of it that way. Yeah, I was really with you there. I thought, wow, yeah, what an exciting, like great angle on this. And yeah, no interest whatsoever. No, it’s always a risk. And she was like, she’s like, oh, that’s true, you know, but it’s just a coincidence. She wasn’t like, you know, get out of here, you asshole. She was quite nice about it. Is Hotel Dust also on your list, Matthew? Is this the only? It isn’t. No, I pick this one. I just prefer the like I said, there’s this sense of an ending to this one. Hotel Dust is cool, but it’s a bit more. It’s a little bit more abstract, I’d say. It probably has a bit more of that kind of sort of slightly strange sort of Twin Peaksiness to it, where this one, I think it just it just everything’s so straight. It’s like borderline boring, which is a really interesting space for like any game to be in. What’s your take on this series then, Andy? This feels like a very much your sort of thing in terms of subject matter. Yeah, I never played Last Window, but yeah, I’ve played Hotel Dust a couple of times. Yeah, really. Again, it’s my love of like a sense of place and a vibe of a actual story, because I probably couldn’t tell you what happened in Hotel Dust, even though I finished it. But I remember that hotel and those scratchy pencil drawn characters and the music, especially what an incredible soundtrack. I remember that stuff so vividly, like my time there rather than like what happened there. That’s kind of Sing’s vibe, I think. It’s just like a, you know, a memory of a thing. They’re a great studio. What a sad ending for them. Of all of the games that we’ve talked about in this podcast, Matthew, I feel like this comes up the most frequently in terms of, you know, people going, oh yeah, I remember that, or oh, I should pick that up on eBay or whatever. So clearly the first time we talked about it, you really capture people’s imaginations. Yeah, I don’t know, I just, like, I don’t know, Sing were there the whole time that we were doing, I just associated Sing with Endgamer. You know, we shut down a little bit after they shut down, I don’t know. I just kind of, our fates feel slightly intertwined, but again, that’s just me being wanky. I see. So you were imposing your Endgamer experience on this game. You were like, oh. I basically am Kyle Hyde, I think. Okay, I see. I would say I am at least as iconic. Yeah, so would I, I think I’d go along with that. Yeah, good choice. I own this and will play it at some point. Sorry, people say that I mention that on this podcast all the time. That’s a phrase I use all the time and it was on that bingo card, I believe. Yeah, Andy, we’re feeling quite seen this week because our listeners put together a bingo card. I saw that on Twitter. And it’s like devastatingly accurate. I’m trying not to say this has something energy because I say that all the time. Yeah, I’m particularly conscious of certain things this week. So I’m being more timid than I normally am hosting this podcast because I’m just about to fall into my own traps over and over again. This is what the listeners have done to us. They’ve completely derailed the podcast. Yeah, they’ve ruined the thing they love. Andy, why don’t you go with your number five? My number five is Blade Runner, the Westwood adventure game from 1997, which is very much an example of a game that I remember as like drawing me into a place and making me feel like a kind of loner detective. You spend a lot of that game just running around futuristic Los Angeles alone in the rain, you know, picking up scraps of like material that might be a clue, like an hour down the line. It’s not so much like a detective simulation in terms of systems. It’s more like a point-and-click adventure, but it’s very timing-based and clue-based, so you can, your path through the story, although the overall arc is quite linear, you can take really different routes through the story by the clues you find and the questions you ask, and the people you put the Voight-Kampff machine on to find out if they’re a replicant. This is like, it’s set in the same universe as the film, but it’s a different story, and it’s a story that’s happening at the same time as the story from the film, so you occasionally see traces of Harrison Ford as you go around doing your own Blade Runner stuff, but it’s kind of just a way for you to play the film because it’s all the same locations, hits a lot of the same story beats, has the same music, you meet the same characters, including a lot of the cast from the film who reunited to play their characters in it, so yeah, it’s just a really great mood piece. It’s pre-rendered backgrounds, looping animated backgrounds with neon signs and rain and with 3D voxel characters in front of it, which looks kind of strange, but it really is one of the most textured tactile games I’ve played. You really feel the grime and the wet of that movie setting. I loved this when I was younger. It used to really stress me out, though, because I played… I was obsessed with point-and-click games like you, the LucasArts stuff, but I could never really get my head around the time element of Blade Runner because wherever they have a point-and-click game, the same thing happened every time. Here, I was like… Look, it actually took me quite a while to work out what was going on. I was thinking, like, wait, this didn’t happen last time. Well, this seems different. It has a bit of action in it as well, where you could shoot people. I remember getting quite stressed out by not really understanding how to properly play this. I don’t think I’ve ever got a good ending to this game. It’s really arcane and confusing. I never really finished it and understood it until I was an adult. I played it loads when I was younger and just loved it as a mood thing. We didn’t actually understand it, but I finished it. I wrote a reinstall retrospective for a PC Gamer on it and finally just finished it and saw the best ending and got my head around its weird approach to design. It really holds up. There’s a randomized element as well where certain characters are replicants, each playthrough and one playthrough. I didn’t know that. I just thought it was timing based. There’s quite a lot of randomized elements, including like, there’s a scene where you meet Tyrell, who’s like, if you don’t know the movie, he’s the guy who creates these replicant humanoids and… Delicious crisps as well. Isn’t that a crisp company? Trials, yeah. But yeah, there’s a scene where you meet him and his assistant and she’s played by Sean Young in the movie, and they got Sean Young back to play her in the game. You can miss that scene and it’s a really rare scene as well. I’ve played it a few times and that scene doesn’t drop, to use modern parlance for randomised things. It’s so weird that they would hide, they would get this actor back to play this iconic role and it’s a randomised scene that you probably won’t see, nine times out of ten you won’t see it. It’s full of stuff like that. It is very opaque. It hides a lot of what’s going on in the background, even though it’s probably quite simple. It gives it that same sort of mysterious feeling as the film, which I really like. The way it captures the vibe of the film is amazing. It is sometimes just the novelty of seeing a bit more of that world or a different camera angle to a place, a location from the film. Just really stunning in that respect. A really weird game for 90s Westwood to make. That’s what I always think is strange with this one. It’s like the C&C people make it, right? Did they make anything else like this, Andy, that you know of? No, I think, yeah, I think other than Command and Conquer and the Dune Games, which were also RTSs, I think this was their only like… I might be totally wrong here, but I’m pretty sure this was their only kind of cinematic story type game. And they really pulled off something amazing with what they had. And I think when it came out, it was, you know, the Blade Runner as a film was old when this came out already. And like it’s super old now. But even then it was like 97, I think the game came out. And so the film came out, I think 86. So there was a good maybe a bit later. But there’s like a gap there. So it was almost like a nostalgia piece then. And now it’s like triple nostalgia. So much time has passed. Between this and Alien Isolation, you’ve got a big thing for RTS teams that knock out amazing love letters to films you’re big into. Wow, that’s the first time I’ve drawn that connection. But yeah, what is it about? Are all RTS developers secretly wanting to make like really moody atmosphere pieces based on Ridley Scott films? I don’t know. Yeah, now we’ve got to get like Relic to make a game based on Ridley Scott’s legend or something. They’re like, we’re making a film based on Nicholas Cage film Matchstick Men. At last! That’s a good choice. That’s available on GOG as well, right, Andy? And they’re working on some kind of enhanced edition at Night Diver Studios, I believe. I think that, yeah, it’s on GOG now and it runs great. But I think, from last I heard, they’ve put it on hiatus because they couldn’t find the source files, or they couldn’t make it work or something. So don’t hold out for the remastered one. Just play the original. And it’s low res, but that only adds to its kind of grimy, textured feeling. I think it still looks great, even at 640x480 or whatever it is. Okay, great stuff, great choice. What’s your number four, Matthew? My number four is Ace Attorney Trilogy. Are any of these games on your list, Andy? Nope. Oh, there we go. Obviously, I mentioned in the last section that I feel this kind of dips into the more Japanese crime traditions of the slightly outrageous murder methods. What I like about this is it’s a rare game where a lot of emphasis is on uncovering the villain and the satisfaction and the drama of unveiling them. I absolutely adore the ends of these trials where the person who’s always super obvious that they’re the baddie, you break them down and then they explode into their real form. It’s one of my favourite things in general in film and TV detective things is the big reveal and the moment where you smash the person down and they suddenly turn on the spot and do their big monologue about how much they loved murdering their mum or whatever. This really ticks that box. It’s the drama of the detective story rather than necessarily a good detective game. If anything, I’d say the investigation section of Ace Attorney is kind of duff. I don’t really enjoy it much. I really like the court stuff. The detective stuff in between is quite drawn out. Just for the sheer flamboyant drama of it and people really dining out and big scenery chewing, I think this is about as good as it gets. Andy, have you played all of these now in the trilogy? I’ve finished the first one. They’re so long, surprisingly long. I don’t mind that they’re so entertaining that I’m not wishing them, willing them to end. But yeah, I’ve finished one and it took more than I expected. So I’m taking a nice big break before I start on the second one. Yeah, that’s a good idea. That’s wise. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I’ve played all three of these. And yeah, I think that well, I’ve not completed the third one, but the first one is definitely better than the second one. Matthew, your the definitive take on this really is that the third one is the highlight of the series, right? Yeah, dramatically, but it needs the first two to kind of work. So they really does exist as a trilogy. It’s quite hard to separate them. But the second one is slightly weaker, but then the payoff in the third is great. I think if you were to play just one of them for like the sort of ingenuity of the actual like murders themselves, I actually think the sixth one is probably the best in terms of case construction, which is kind of weird because it’s not a Shootakumi one at all. You have nothing to do with it. That’s Spirit of Justice, one of the 3DS games. But I just think the cases in that game are pretty good. Like they’re quite hard to predict. They’re quite hard to sort of second guess. And it’s probably the only Ace Attorney where like the twists in the case actually landed for me. But I don’t think that takes away from the trilogy, which is definitely better written and it’s got some great characters. It really annoys me that the film adaptation of this by… Oh, what’s his name? He’s the guy who does like 20 films a year, the Japanese director. Directed like audition, isn’t that Takashi Mike? He did a live action adaptation of this, which I really am not into. Like it’s quite messy and all over the place. And it really bugs me because I think there’d be a… I think there’d be a really entertaining, big, shiny live action version of this somewhere. If Hollywood gave me a million, a hundred million dollars, that’s what I’d make. What’s your number four, Andy? Oh, we’ve lost them. My number four is Paradise Killer. Nice. Did that make your list, Matthew? It didn’t make my list. Almost did. Actually, this is quite interesting, Andy, because we talked earlier about the idea of detective games not having these quite outlandish settings, and this one definitely does. So what is it about this game setting that makes it compelling to you as a framework for detective story? Yeah, that was my sort of biggest hoda with it. Like I bought it basically based on the art style, which I immediately fell in love with. And when I started playing it, it’s this kind of bizarre island filled with outer space deities and weird characters with outlandish personalities and a strange like mythology and demonology and all this weird stuff going on. And like, initially, I think that a lot of people I know stumbled with that stuff. And I just persevered with it. I was playing on Switch, which was a perfect format for it again. As a detective game. But once I don’t know, once I pushed through that, I’ve really got quite compelled by the weird mythology of it all. Once you cut through that is just like a good mystery with a clear kind of a clear structure and stuff. So once you’ve got your head around the bizarreness of it, you can just focus on the actual mystery, which is just a good kind of process of interrogating people and finding clues and stuff. But what what really I love about it is that it’s an open world detective game and I can’t think of any other examples of that where you’ve got this whole island and it’s absolutely heaving with clues that are kind of logged in your personal assistant. But like you can go to trial at any time and so you can if you think you’ve you know you could thoroughly explore the island and think that you’ve found everything and I did I did that and I went to trial and I got a really unsatisfying outcome where like someone I really liked my sense, you know, to death and it just didn’t that the mystery the story even though the judge accepted my version of events it just never sat right with me so I reloaded my last save and explored the island some more like really got really deep into every corner of it and I found one room that completely changed the entire my entire version of events like it disproved everything that I put in court and revealed what I think is like the truth of what happens in that game and I was amazing that just one little clue could rewrite the entire case and then I went through I went to trial again and it was a much more satisfying outcome and the person I thought was the culprit got executed instead of my buddy and it just you know I love how open-ended that is like that’s really like brave game design to like let you just you know go out there on your own kind of at your own pace and you can easily just screw up and get like a really They’re really unsatisfying ending, and that’s fine. I would say this one’s like impressive. It leaves you like impressively off the leash by detective game standards. It’s a bit of a gamble. I found it very overwhelming in the way that Andy kind of outlined there in terms of the sort of terminology they use in universe. I found very like, oh, wow, I’m not even sure I’m smart enough to wrap my head around this before I can even conceptualize what the mystery is. But I did like it. I did love its confidence as well building, it’s kind of like dream casty, flower, sun and rain style aesthetic. That’s just such a powerful kind of like win in its corner. I’ve got this on Switch and I will hammer through it at some point. I think if I played it at my desk on PC, I wouldn’t have spent, I wouldn’t have given myself to it as much, whereas playing on Switch, like lying in bed or on the sofa, I felt more like equipped to sort of give time to learning about the mythology and the weirdness. Whereas if I was sat on my PC, I think I’d be more impatient. So I think it’s a case of a game being improved by being handheld. Yeah, it happens quite a lot these days. Yeah, it’s the one thing I would say about like, I love the structure. I think you’re right. Like the way the clues are spread out and the way that like what clue you find first can completely change your perception. Like right up to the end, you keep flip-flopping and you know, the story is amazingly well constructed in that regard. I’m not, I would say I’m not 100% sold on like the kind of trial structure at the end. Like you get, you know, like 10 hours or whatever of exploring and then there’s this like big kind of dump of narrative at the end. And that is the only way it can really work with this particular story. That is just the cost of having this open world structure to it in that it needs to kind of build itself in that way. But, you know, it’s, it’s, this is like a classic, you know, I wish there was a more to be done in that world or a way to kind of return to that world because I feel like I can’t really play it again. Yeah, I agree with it. I think the trial is the weak point in terms of how it’s structured. Because a lot of it is kind of just told to you. Whereas I’d love to see a game, if they did a sequel, I’d love to see the same open world clue gathering structure but with like a really good Phoenix Wright style showdown at the end. I think that’s the one thing it missed. And I interviewed the developers, I wrote a making of feature on Paradise Killer. Because I just got so obsessed with it, I just wanted to talk to them for my own amusement. So I thought I’d better, you know, find an excuse to do that. And like they said that the trial stuff, as far as I might be getting this wrong, but I think they said the trial stuff wasn’t, it was kind of last minute in a way, or like I think they had an idea of how the story would end but they changed it quite late on. So maybe the way it feels as a result of that. But it felt like the development process was quite improvised and quite experimental. And I think that has resulted in a lot of positives but maybe some negatives, like that trial not being quite as compelling at the end. Regardless, it is like an amazing debut for that team. Like they are now instantly on my radar for whatever they do next. And the music as well is incredible. Like one of the best soundtracks of in like 10 years, I’d say like up there. Absolutely brilliant. Great stuff. So what’s your number three? My three is Disco Elysian. On your list Andy? That’s my number three as well. Let’s do it then. So this is like the big game of the moment. I mean, basically like these two games, sort of like the last two games we discussed, this and Paralyzed Killer are the kind of like modern faces of this genre to, seemingly anyway from how I see people talk about it on social media. So, Matthew, why don’t you kick off and tell us about the impact it had on you? I must admit, like, I was a bit nervous about Disco Elysium because, you know, it’s this incredible, like, mega brain of a game. And a lot of the stuff I’d read and heard about it and the way people talked about it, I thought, is this going to be a bit too, like, chewy and intellectual for me? But actually, what surprises me about it, and I don’t think it gets talked about as much as some of the other ideas in it, is that it’s this really dense mystery. Like, just the mystery at the heart of it is incredibly satisfying to unpick. You know, there’s an obvious sort of start to it and there’s the kind of key through line that kind of takes you through the game. But really, what amazed me was, like, how many of the side quests, how much of the world, all kind of folded back into the sort of central mystery towards the end. I mean, there was stuff I thought, oh, this can’t possibly be related. And it kind of was. And I just thought it was a bit of mystery writing and a bit of mystery construction, which it didn’t really sell itself on, particularly. It was more about these bigger ideas going on there. But just as a genre piece, I think it’s amazingly well done. And I love that it’s like an RPG built on police detective tropes. There’s different kinds of cops. And it kind of leans into the kind of, you know, you can be the kind of homsie and kind of super sleuth, sort of genius who can kind of visualize everything. You know, you can be the kind of maverick cop who kind of goes in with the fists or someone incredibly charming. I felt it leant into like so many different kinds of detective stories. And they all sort of held up. But, you know, there’s obviously a lot more to the game. And I kind of, I don’t know, I feel like I ignore a lot of its strengths to focus on the thing I like, which is, you know, I was just happy with it as a detective RPG. Okay, all this stuff about the kind of maybe like the politics of the region or whatever, I didn’t really like, wasn’t really my cup of tea. So, yeah, I don’t know. How did you feel about this one, Andy? Yeah, I mean, funnily enough, since we both picked it at the same slot, my my angle on it is exactly the same as yours. And that I was I found the history and politics and stuff interesting, but it wasn’t why I was there. Like I was there for the complex labyrinthine mystery. And like it really delivered there. It really reminded me a lot of Raymond Chandler novels, actually, in that you’ll have like one event, a crime, and you’ll have like five different groups of people who are all misleading each other in ways, like so that you’re trying to thread, you’ve got like a tangle of thread and you’re trying to like follow them all to a point of truth. And like, there’s so many people in the Scholesium that are trying to mislead you or trying to lie about the fact that they are the culprit to protect someone else. And all that keeps stacking up and I found that trying to untangle that mess of lies and contradictions was, like you said, not often written about. I think a lot of people fall in love with the, it’s kind of wild artistic political leanings. But I think the actual mystery is like super dense and satisfying. Yeah, like if you do go down the route of having like a detective who’s great at like computing and logic, you know, just some of the descriptions of the scenes where he breaks them down, like there’s one where he talks about all the different shoe, he sees all the different shoe sizes around like a hanging and then deduces all this stuff. Like that writing is better Sherlock Holmes writing than you get in any of the Sherlock Holmes games. And it’s just one variation of that character. You may not even have that skill. You may not see any of it. There’s so much good, good detective stuff in this. I actually really like the ending is what I really liked the mystery was about. Because I know some people are a little down, you know, we’re not going to spoil it here, obviously, but I actually thought it saw it through to the end and I was quite content. Yeah, I can see why some people might feel that the ending sneaks up on them a bit, but I think it all, it doesn’t feel like it’s just pulling the rug out from under you for the sake of it. It all ties in thematically and there’s a logic behind everything. But yeah, I played it as like, I don’t know, my last play through, I played the final cut, which is like the latest release of it, which adds full voice acting and a bunch of new stuff. I played it as super heavy on logic and visual calculus, which are two of the skills in the game. So my guy was like you said, like amazingly observant and like the autopsy scene is like one of the most disgusting pieces of writing I’ve ever read because he’s like talking about this horribly decayed body in such a matter of fact way that I found it really repulsive, but in a kind of strangely compelling way. But yeah, I think my first playthrough was more of like a instinctive, I’ve had a lot of points in my inland empire skill, which is like a lot of tuning into like dream logic and the environment and stuff. So like that first playthrough I enjoyed, but like I felt like I didn’t uncover much about the mystery, whereas if you play as like a full on logic and visual calculus and Sherlock type detective, then you’ll get the best detective experience out of it if you play that character. But it’s also worth still playing as like an unobservant, thick muscle man who just punches everyone. That’s valid. It’s got a good sidekick dynamic with Kim as well. That’s a great detective trope, the kind of, you know, he’s like the Lewis to your Morse or whatever. Oh yeah, I need to, I haven’t played the final cut. I need to go back to it actually. That’s talking about it has, yeah, it’s inspired me to do that. It’s great. The final cut, the voice, all the voices in your head, so all that narration and when you’re your various facets of your brain are arguing or talking over each other, like they voiced all that and they got this actor called Lenville Brown who’s a reggae musician who’s never acted before and he played that character and I interviewed my PC Gamer actually because I was so taken by his performance, like he really, I felt like I absorbed so much more of the, because I wasn’t, you know, when you’re reading these vast walls of text, I have a tendency to skip skim because I want to get to the next thing, whereas I sat and just listened to it all being spoken to me by this guy’s amazingly like deep sort of musical voice and it really sunk in a lot more. So like I think if you play final cut, it feels like a quite a different experience. I’m not even sure I even thought of this as a detective game, to be honest. Like I thought, oh, it’s that game where you’re the gross cop going around doing, trying to find your clothes and then just like getting into kind of random adventures. I never really thought of it as a mystery game. I mean, it is that too. It just depends on how much you want to lean into the mystery based on how you build your character and it’s great that it’s got that freedom. Like you can just be, you can fully just become a, you know, drug devouring party animal who just loves seeing the weirdest things possible to people or you can go straight edge and go logical and like play it like a buttoned up straight detective. Yeah. I feel like they want you to go wild, but they’ve accidentally made an incredibly compelling like game to play completely straight. Great stuff. Yeah, I feel like with you Andy, there was no chance that first play through you being a big David Lynch fan, there was no way you were going to throw loads of points into Inland Empire. Exactly. As soon as I saw that name, I was like, that’s where all my skill points are going. Great stuff. So what’s your number two, Matthew? I’ve picked Danganronpa 1 for this, which is quite like Ace Attorney. I don’t have either of you played Danganronpa? Yeah, I’ve played the first one. I love that actually. I have not. It’s very like Ace Attorney. It’s kind of Ace Attorney meets sort of persona in a way, because there’s like crimes and mysteries, and then there’s like a social element in between, which I’m not like massively bothered about that stuff. But the actual crimes are brilliant. Like the actual construction of the murders, I think is probably the best crime construction in a game that I’ve played. And again, this leans super heavy into like my tastes of Japanese detective fiction. But they are really barmy, weird cases where people have, you know, contrived the sort of impossible murders. And it’s the whole the whole kind of hook of Danganronpa is you’ve got these kids locked in a school. And the only way you can escape is to kill a fellow classmate, and then be found not guilty in the trial. So it’s not just a case of killing someone, all the murders then have to also point towards someone else and sort of frame someone else. So they’re quite kind of like, far out. And then also into the mix, every single student is kind of a this is a school for gifted students, they’re all ultimate something, the ultimate gymnast, the ultimate computer hacker, whatever. So they’ve all got these quite interesting skills, which also come into play, which can put these further twists. And it sounds really daft, and it is dumb and really mad. But the I love the cases in this, I think all through the series one to three, that they escalated in brilliance. It’s a bit much. That’s the only thing like the game around it is like it’s pretty hectic. And the trials themselves, they’re like Ace Attorney times like 100 in terms of madness, because it’s instead of just like presenting evidence, everything is is like a bullet, you sort of shoot truth bullets at the contradictory statements. And it’s almost got like an arcade element in that you actually have to like, line up the sites and shoot these statements as they fly across the screen, which I think some people find a bit much. Like, I think it would probably work without all that hectic jazz on top. It’s a lot of like, there’s substance, but there’s like style that gets in the way of it as well. It’s got these duff mini games where you like surf down like the logic highway and things and sort of jump over gaps to reach conclusions. But I actually think the combination of the case ingenuity and how they construct some of the trial sections, it just means that you actually, I think you reach conclusions at the same time as the characters do in the game in this quite neat way. I really, really like that about it. I think it’s that kind of the drama of Ace Attorney, but with slightly better murder mysteries. Andy, I remember you reviewing this when I was editing PC Gamer actually. What was your, I remember you gave it like 90% or something. What did you make of it? Yeah, I think I maybe give it high 80s, like 87 or something. I can’t remember. But yeah, that came to PC finally after quite a long while of not being available. And I think two and three are on there now. And yeah, I think that in terms of constructing a mystery that immediately grabs hold of you and you want to know what the hell’s going on, like it’s great at that. And the, I found the, I got weirdly connected to the characters to the point when they started dying. Like I got quite a, like I got quite distressed when like, cause I saw the ridiculous caricatures and anime as hell, but they’re like so vividly painted like I got, like when they died, I felt an actual pang of like, damn that sucks. So like that really, the investment there was like a lot stronger than I thought. But you look at the artwork and think, I’m not going to get invested in these characters, but I really did. Yeah, I think cause you can, you know, you can spend one trial basically trying to prove that, you know, someone who looks guilty is innocent and then they might be the guilty one in the next trial. And that’s actually quite a good twist because, you know, not a twist, it’s quite a good sort of a sort of emotional blackmail in a way, because you get super attached to the people you’ve saved in previous trials. So when they do turn out to be shitbags, it’s like quite a big betrayal and you are sort of like weirdly invested. Yeah, I really rate this series. I think this is like really, you know, if you can get past some of the some of the loopier aspects, it’s really well done. And you don’t like at the start you think any of these characters could make it through to the end. Like they’re all quite interesting. Like it kills off so many interesting characters just in the course of the story, but still sort of delivers by the end. Danganronpa. It’s good stuff. Yeah, great shout. So what’s your number two then, Andy? Number two is Sherlock Holmes Crimes and Punishments. So what is it that the other games don’t do so well, that this one just seems to kind of perfect? Well, I think as someone who is into, as I’ve said a few times now, like games that create a sense of place, but also likes a nice, deep detective system, this does both really well. So like it’s the period setting is like really atmospheric and like considering it’s a medium, medium, low to medium budget game, like it’s really beautifully presented. There’s lots of nice like low key environments, like one case is just set entirely in like a small train station somewhere in Yorkshire, you know, the whole case takes place between like two or three stations in a small area. So it’s really good at that. And one takes place in like a Roman bath, one takes place in a like botanic gardens. It’s all like very old school detective stuff like ITV drama vibe, like quite muted. But as well as that, the actual detective systems where you can, there’s a simulation of Sherlock’s mind palace, which is a ridiculous term. But where you, the clues you find, you have to like drag neurons between them to draw conclusions. And the more clues you find, the more you can sort of justify making a conclusion. And that would that would lead to another conclusion and eventually reach the end of the case. But the game lets you piece the clues together that make conclusions that are wrong, which can result in you ultimately accusing the wrong person. And that I think is what the core of like what makes this interesting. And it’s definitely not the minigames and puzzles which are terrible, but they let you skip them. And I advise skipping them every time. They suck. What kind of stuff do they have you doing at those minigames? They’re like, like, I’m trying to think that there’s a lot of chemical mixing and turning this, like one set in like a tomb raidery style, like underground temple or something. This is a really infamous minigame where Sherlock Holmes rotates a stink cloud to make a picture so he can basically identify a scent. But the picture is always this. It’s really on the nose. Yeah, like this one where he basically, he spins his stink cloud and he makes a picture of a sombrero and it allows him to work out that like a Mexican guy’s been in the room, which is just like wild. Yeah, those bits are terrible. Like any time it tries to simulate Sherlock’s brain doing its Sherlock thing is terrible. But when you’re just walking around these really atmospheric environments talking to like weirdly amazing looking character models and there’s like you do the Sherlock thing of like zooming in on them and like looking at like, oh, there’s a butter stain on his on his wrist. That means he’s been eating crumpets, you know, like that ridiculous building a psych profile based on like random clues like his hands are calloused, he’s a working man, all that ridiculous stuff. But like it’s really that stuff’s fun. But yeah, when it starts making you do these mini games, but it’s telling that there’s always an option to just skip them. What about you, Matthew? Did you get into this series at all? Yeah, I did. I think some of the sillier elements of it kind of hamper a bit for me. But I agree with Andy, the actual the core like deduction system and the fact that you can accuse multiple people and the you know, the kind of mystery allows you to logic your way to multiple conclusions. But there is a right answer. And there’s like always a you always have to sort of think about it a bit more to kind of get to that right answer. I mean, it’s like quite a rare, what feels like a slightly more bigger budget crime game that has has actually tried to like think about the art of deduction, how to represent it in its systems, which I really think should be celebrated and it like it has returned in the other games and even though the ones like The Devil’s Daughter that came afterwards was was a bit rope here, I think, but it still has this core thing, which I think is a good system and it means like, you know, I’m secretly quite excited for the next game. Like I’m interested to see what Frogways do with these games because, you know, there’s there’s good ideas in it. My only concern is that they keep making Sherlock and Watson hotter and younger when I want them to look like stuffy old guys like in Crimes and Punishments, they’re like full on classic deerstalker, mustachioed Watson like that. That feels right to me. I don’t want it to be like some guy in a tailored suit, you know, with a nice haircut. He looked like John Hamm in Devil’s Daughter. To the point where they definitely just used a picture of John Hamm as reference, like uncanny. I feel like the problem was, it’s the Sherlock Holmes films with Robert Downey Jr. came out like in between or around the time. And I think that tempted them to try and make it like sexy Holmes. Because the next one, he’s even young, he’s like a teen, he’s like a, isn’t it like Holmes Year Zero or something? Yeah, I feel like that stuff maybe could get in the way of the mysteries. But I mean, I just, I like, like I think I mentioned already, it has that ITV drama vibe and I think Crimes and Punishments has that like stuffy old, old timey feel that I really like. I don’t want it to be too slick and fancy. I’ve always thought of it as a bit of a guilty pleasure, but I am a big fan of this one. So you’ve reached your number one then Matthew. I wonder if you’ve got the same number one, what’s yours? My number one is Return of the Obra Dinn. Andy is that not your number one? No. Oh, good stuff. I was kind of hoping that would be the case. I’m really hoping. I feel like I’ve got a feeling what Andy’s number one is, but I just want to, yeah, I guess we’ll see. But yeah, Matthew, so this is kind of considered like the ultimate detective game by a lot of people. So I don’t think it’s that surprising a choice for you. But why did this have to be top of your list? Yeah, for me, this is this is the one detective game that has really nailed the sensation of like, of being in a in a dense crime scene or a scene that’s so dense with information and having to like pass it and make, you know, deductions based on it and not just any deductions, but heaps of the thing because you’re trying to work out what killed every individual member of crew. So it’s just like, like mysteries per square inch, which is a very unsophisticated way of thinking about this game is like incredibly high, you know, it’s quite a tight space, it’s absolutely packed with stuff. I just love how it’s just a game about dealing with an immense amount of information like visual information of what you can actually see on this boat. If you’ve not played it, you can basically sort of you on this you on this boat where everyone’s all the crews disappeared, you’re trying to work out what’s going on, what’s happened to all of them. And you can kind of flash back to sort of moments in history and sort of like still moments in history and you have to deduce from like little bits of audio what you can see, information in like the crew ledger that you’re given. This is the closest thing I’ve played to the process you go through of reading a mystery novel where you’ve got all the clues and you start piecing it together, except it had systems in place that allowed you to kind of express that. So you basically enter kind of like who someone is and how they died. And you have to sort of put this in for several people at once. And you can’t just keep testing like random selections. You have to test them in kind of clumps. So which is the way it kind of makes sure you’re not just trying to game it by just, you know, putting the same thing in, just thumbing your way through the menus. So it’s quite hard to explain out loud. So I hope that doesn’t sound massively confusing. But the simple version is it’s a really dense mystery to unpick, and it has the mechanics to allow you to input those solutions and test them, which is really all you need in a detective game, I feel. And I just thought this tested so many different bits of my brain in terms of, you know, there was the logical deduction of, well, if this character’s here and, you know, he’s saying this, you know, who would speak to this, you know, he’s speaking to this other character, so that means I learn the other character’s name and then I can use that to work out which bunk he’s in and I can check out his bunk in another bit of time. Like, trying to unpick any one strand of this game is kind of impossible verbally, like it’s so dense. I have no idea how um, it’s Lucas Pope, it’s the papers please guy, how the hell he held all this together, and like, this ship which, kind of in a similar way actually too, weirdly Paradise Killer. How that has all these clues listed across a city and the order you find them in can change your perception. Here, like, the order you tackle this ship and the, you know, what you spot and which route you follow, the way it doesn’t just unravel everything at once is mind-bogglingly clever. I’m just waiting for the day that I forget enough of this game that I can replay it, because when I played it, it absolutely blew me away. This is, like, legitimately in my top five games of all time, I think, just for, like, it’s the only game which has really given me the magic and made me feel like a detective. That’s just stunning. I absolutely love this game. I cannot wait to see what Andy’s picked as his number one. I feel like I know, but Andy, before we get to that, I feel like this is a game that you would also like. How come it didn’t quite make your list? Yeah, I reviewed it for PC Gamer and gave it 90%, I think. I think it has everything. I agree with everything about the way it makes you feel alternately incredibly dumb, then incredibly smart and the way it really tests your observation skills. I think if I had to place it, it would probably be just outside my top five. I think the only reason is I just felt too dumb sometimes. I spent more time frustrated wandering around the ship, not been able to quite latch on to the next key piece of information more than I did feeling like a brain genius. So that’s the only reason. Like I really love any story set at sea, so I love the whole nautical vibe. But yeah, I think that the feeling, I look back on it with a lot of frustration as much as there is admiration, but that’s the only reason it didn’t quite scrape the top five. Yeah, like you say, Matthew, it’s a hard one to break down in audio. I played about an hour and a half of it and I felt like it was like playing Guess Who in interactive dioramas. Yeah, I reviewed this one and I’m quite pleased with my review. I felt like I actually managed to get my head around it eventually, but when I’ve told people about it or I’ve tried to recommend people to, I always come unstuck because, you know, you just try and pass a load of information on a boat. There’s also some like horrendous, like weird supernatural stuff on this, which normally wouldn’t land for me, but actually kind of like the history of the boat is wild and that is part of the fun. It’s a good horror game as well. Yeah, I mean, they have a horrible time on this boat, I mean, it really puts you off any kind of sea travel. But yeah, I love this game and I really, you know, I hope someone else makes something like it because it’s kind of spoiled a lot of other detective-y things for me, I think. Oh, great stuff. Well then, Andy, what’s your number one? Number one is LA Noire. Yes, I thought it would be. I’m very proud of you, Andy, because I feel like this is a game that I’ve seen so many of our peers sort of dunk on, but what’s the kind of magic of LA Noire for you? Yeah, well, it’s a very long game. Like with all the DLC cases, you’re looking at like 40 to 50 hours and I’ve finished it four times, once on PS3, twice on PC and once on Switch, actually. When I was on Holiday in Devon, I was ignoring the beach to pretend I was in LA looking at murder scenes. Yeah, like, again, just comes back to that feeling of place and time and being personally into the period. You can tell Team Bondi, like, were as obsessed with that period as me, it’s full of references to not just, you know, big hallmarks of noir and 40s detective fiction, but loads of deep cuts and references that like, let you know that they really know their stuff and like the replica of LA in that time period is so, like, technically it’s not great because even at the time it was quite technically inferior to like GTA and stuff, not quite as polished but like the mood and just the colors and the music, the sort of period music drifting out of cars as they go past and all that, like, it’s full on, it’s a game world I get completely lost in whenever I play it and I just play it as like time travel, you know, it’s like to exist in that completely different place. But on top of all that, just I think it’s not like in terms of a detective game, I don’t think it’s great in terms of systems, there’s like a handful of moments where you can have a slightly different outcome but it’s basically all prescribed, there’s a few clues you can miss that give you like a better ranking at the end but really it’s just a linear story game basically but the mysteries themselves are like really, a lot of them are really well constructed I think with like really good payoffs and as a kind of episodic feel as well like almost an anthology feel where there’s a running story but like every case is like a different slice of life from the period and so you know deal with different businesses and people from all different walks of life and that just gives you a really nice picture of like the period just I really like it’s full of great actors like so many madmen actors which is great but also just loads of character actors that you see in like that you go I know that face you’re constantly going I know that face and it’s great that they just brought all these like jobbing character actors in to the studio stuck them in that ridiculous face rig and just gone to like act their asses off and I think in terms of I think it’s a bit of like maturity and like a feel of like TV, like, you know, feel of like proper TV drama, like the whole mood of it is just like, just perfect for me, like not perfect. I love it. I want to, I want to replay again, just talking about it. That Switch version is great as well. I’ve played that handheld version. It’s amazing. It runs, yeah, like on the Switch Lite, it’s just having Ellie Noire, like on a handheld. Is it, is it right? Is it, is it? Yeah, it runs really well. Like you don’t get the same frame rate you do with the PC version, obviously, but like, yeah, it feels like playing the original PS3 and 360. Yeah, it does. And it’s enhanced slightly. They’ve done some, they’ve added some like new lighting and shadows and some like visual enhancements. So it actually looks better than it did on PS3. They’ve added a case where Wario has murdered someone. Oh, I’d love that. I’m really curious, because Matthew, I feel like I could guess your take on this, which is that you don’t, I mean, I actually agree with Andy that it’s not a great detective game in terms of mechanics, but submerges you in its sense of place, like so completely that it just has such a magic to it. What’s your take on this one? Yeah, no, I do love it. I mean, it was, it’s, again, it’s hovering just outside of my top five. You know, it feels like a playable Ailroy novel. This is the thing I mentioned earlier, like the sense of like driving up and walking into the crime scenes. It feels so sort of, I don’t know, like naughty. You’re not meant to be there, but it’s really cool with everyone like Gore King and the actual theatricality of the crime scenes and how many they are and how different they all are. It’s really exciting. I think my only problem with LA Noire is, I think it kind of peaks in Homicide, which is obviously like the middle of the game. And then it’s Vice and Arson. I think ending on the Arson department is kind of a mistake for me. And I kind of get it. Like it’s part of the overall character story and like what happens to him. But you get such juicy stuff with the kind of sort of Black Dahlia-esque stuff in the middle that it kind of, I don’t know, peaks a little early for me. That’s my only beef. What do you think of that, Andy, in terms of the peak of the game? That’s a criticism that gets leveled at LA Noire quite a lot. Yeah, I think the Homicide Desk is actually my least favourite, because I think without spoiling it, some of the individual moments are great, but without spoiling anything, it kind of, at the end, tries to be clever and pull the rug out from under you a bit, and it doesn’t fully pay off for me. But there is a cool case where you are, it ties right into the Black Dahlia, the real case, and that’s quite cool to feel like you’re playing a role in that famous and horrible case. But yeah, I think I really love Vice. I want to spend more time there. I love seeing him cruising around with that Roy Earl. Oh, he’s good, yeah. He’s such a brilliant asshole, and I love hanging out with him and driving around in his Cadillac and roughing up drug dealers and stuff. I just wanted more of that seedy underbelly stuff. So I really like the bit when you switch roles to the insurance investigator guy. That was like, insurance investigator was such a noir archetype. I like that kind of change of scenery when you’re playing as Jack Kelso for a couple of hours. Yeah, I haven’t replayed it since I played it on 360. So I think it’s been enough time that I’ve forgotten this, I need to go back. I just remember the end of the game being a lot of like looking at exploding ovens and things. I quite like that as a conspiracy to unravel as a player. Like I found it quite sinister and how John Noble’s character plays into it. I actually liked how it connected the dots in those bits. But you know, I take a point. Some of that’s hazy memory on my part, I think. The conspiracy stuff, it’s very much a riff on Chinatown. Where in Chinatown, it’s the water company that’s corrupt and people building homes for returning GIs from the war. And I really like that, building a mystery around real history. And there’s a few moments where you, where Cole Phelps’ job sort of drifts into real moments in LA history, when it has a bit of a sort of semi-buff of that era. That’s very cool to see. But I can imagine anyone who’s not fully into that period, not getting as much out of it as me. So I might be slightly skewed in that sense. This is so obvious as your number one choice now. I don’t know why I didn’t say it. I’m obviously not a very good detective. It’s like a good game to play if you’ve been listening to the You Must Remember This podcast. They kind of go hand in hand, I think. Some of the DLC cases are cool too. Not all of them are great, but this one that I think has all of your different sidekicks come into the story. I remember that one being quite good. Yeah, that’s one where a factory blows up and turns a city block into a pile of rubble when you’ve got to pick through it and find out what happened. That’s on the Arson Desk, actually. It’s a DLC case. You’re making a strong case for the Arson Desk. Yeah, I love this game. There will never be anything else like this again. It’s such an odd thing for Rockstar to bankroll. Great stuff. We’ve reached the two-hour mark. Good stuff. It was great hearing your suggestions there, Andy. I think LA Noire is a fantastic pick. I really love that game despite I know everyone makes the same joke about doubts in that game. But it’s a wonderful thing. Where can people find you on social media, Andy? I’m sure most of the people listening to this follow you already. But where can people catch you? Yeah, I’m at UltraBilliant on Twitter. People can read your work on PC Gamer, right? Is there anything else you’re working on at the moment that’s worth highlighting? Yeah, not really. I’m in the between projects phase at the moment. So yeah, all my creative energy has gone into pcgamer.com at the moment. Well, good stuff. Well, thank you so much for joining us. Really appreciate your time. Matthew, where can people find you on Twitter? I’m at MrBazzill UnderscorePeste. I’m Samuel W. Roberts. We’re at Back Page Pod on Twitter. If you want to email us, send us some longer thoughts. We’re BackPageGames at gmail.com. Thank you very much for listening. And we’ll be back next Friday with another episode. Thank you.