Detective games are the best they’ve ever been – and it’s because they’re all cold cases

There was a point in the detective game Thimbleweed Park where I just gave up. What started as calm evidence gathering and careful note-taking spiralled downward into an abyss of manic and desperate mouse-clicking. I clicked on every inch of every scene, dragging and dropping all the objects over each other so I didn’t miss any special item uses. I talked to every NPC three, four, five times to no avail. Logic and reason had long left me, my deerstalker had been blown away by a gust of frustration, and my magnifying glass had smashed into oblivion from annoyance. I couldn’t figure out what the game wanted from me. I understand that the point-and-click mystery of Thimbleweed Park leans on tongue-and cheek-humour rooted in the genre’s history of obtuse puzzle solving. But this one, small part of the game took the biscuit. It harked back to the LucasArt games, where some clues were on the brink of pure - if charming - abstraction. Clue-gathering and crime-solving has come a long way since the pixelated puzzles of the past - yet even now, it’s still difficult for detective games to balance both story and mechanics in a way that makes you feel like a real sleuth.

from PCGamesN http://bit.ly/2CDPd9u