The game has an excellent story and when the puzzles are logical the game is a blast, however there is one puzzle that made me quit and without spoiling it, the solution is downright evil. There is a puzzle that gives you every hint to the solution and also presents you with the main target, however the solution is found later in the game through something entirely unrelated. I spent 2 hours losing my mind to this puzzle without even knowing that I was missing something all along.

tldr: this game is one that I would only recommend if you have the patience of a saint and are willing to abandon some puzzles to try other ones.

One of the most immersive mystery game ever. Now that I finished it, it's hard to see mystery games the same anymore.

"Can she run really really REALLY fast in high heels? Then she's a ho." - Riley Freeman

Genuinely the best mystery game I’ve ever played, it’s a shame you can only experience it once due to how the genre works but everyone should play this if you are a fan of mystery games

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This is a really intricate complex game, and I had to use a guide for it, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. I enjoyed the diaries and letters I'd find that gave little crumbs of information, and became really invested in the plot. I got attached to the characters even though I never actually met them, and only read about them as I searched through the abandoned town. The ending was SO scary, I had to pause and take a breather lol 10/10 game

This is a fun game that suffers from Unity jank. To find clues and other items you have to go through dozens of empty/pointless drawers In additional to several locked doors, that cannot be opened at all through the game, it makes backtracking a pain. This may be by design as the game is supposed to emulate real detective work. It feels like the camera is fighting you all the way in this game; there is a constant focus on what you are looking at on your cursor, but the rest of the screen emulates hindsight vision, which I hated. Lastly, I think having everything in the journal and not having to take pictures of thing and allowing us to hide things we are done with would be nice.

This might be the fairest murder mystery I have ever seen in game, movie or novel form. For those of you unfamiliar with the term "fair mystery" it's one where all the clues exist in the story and a competent reader can figure out whodunnit before the reveal. An unfair mystery requires knowledge that is kept from the reader to be properly solved. It also might involve some heavy lateral thinking that the protagonist jumps to, but the reader cannot be reasonably expected to make. In the case of a murder mystery game, that would involve moon logic puzzles like wrapping a rubber duck in jumper cables and dangling it off a balcony to somehow get a key. There is none of that nonsense in this game. Not a bit of it.

Nearly everything you need to solve the mystery is either in plain sight or hidden in perfectly reasonable places like inside desk drawers or closets. You know, normal places people would put things. There are a handful of items in strange locations. Each and every one of those items has clues pointing you to where to go.
Before I get into my deeper nitpicks, I want to address the plot and story: holy gosh this is some masterful mystery writing. You'll think, "Maybe this guy did it. He seems hinky." Only to get a little deeper in and then realize "no wait, it can't be him! He died first!" The story has been carefully and exquisitely parceled out in drips and drabs so that you're constantly encountering revelations that suddenly make one person or another being the killer much more plausible. It's like twist after twist because you're trying to put together a giant puzzle. I think the last time I ping-ponged so much on whodunnit was the movie Clue. And that has three entirely different endings with different killers!

Onto the nitpicky analysis that will attempt to be spoiler free to lite:

Anyone who has played mystery games will be familiar with the dreaded pixel hunt. I'm happy to say that the devs didn't lean on that at all. There were only five instances in the game where the game devolved into pixel hunting for me. The first was for a hidden panel in the inn that was the only one that really felt unfair. The clue was a bit too oblique and I spent a lot of time looking at the significantly more obvious things that could have been hiding it. It was an optional clue though, and unnecessary for the solve. The second was near the end of the game where you're told "the key is in a thing in town" but you're not told where that thing is. So you have to scour the entire town to find it. It's not difficult to see, but if you manage to miss it the first time, it's going to be a little annoying.
The other three pixel hunts I indulged in all had clues pointing them out. In all three cases I'd simply noticed something was weird in the environment and had gone digging before I had the clue at all. So, I count those as extra good work by the devs as environment building. Quite literally one of them amounted to "who would put that there? That makes no sense. Something is hinky."

I'm going to reiterate that because it's really important: I literally used real world logic to say "there's no justifiable reason for this sink faucet to be here. There's no plumbing. Something is hidden here," and I was right. In a video game. (It was not a faucet or plumbing related. But I don't want to give away the real thing. But functionally it was similar in concept.) In most games you'd just say "of course there's no plumbing. That wasn't an important detail to add." But it's there in this game. The world has been crafted so sensibly that you can actually do that. This is what art looks like folks. Never before in my 30+ decades of video game experience has real life logic paid off for me in such a manner. My ghasts are flabbered.

That said, here is my one major quibble. There is a little video game logic here. This is a story that unfolded over literal decades. People come and go. The most egregious example is the car in the middle of town. It's just abandoned in the middle of the street. Yes, people were moving out of town left and right, but surely somebody would have towed the thing. After all, someone cared enough to try to evict the owner of the car...but never followed up on it apparently? Another character was arrested under suspicion of murder. Was his home ransacked by the cops looking for evidence? Nope. Diaries and notes that should have been evidence are just lying around. Untouched by people who came after and really should not have just left things there. It ultimately winds up feeling more like the entire town was abducted by aliens over the course of five years, and any time they got taken their home was just put into stasis. Just don't think about that part all that hard everything else works so well that I kind of have to forgive one small breach of rationality in the service of making a fun game.

I need more games like this. I want more games where I just dig into the seedy underbelly of a town that basically vanished. (Seriously, like give me a Control crossover where they're investigating an AWE where the whole town vanished and the game plays just like this and is written by this team. Shut up and take my money. Please make your next game SCP based. It will literally remove my only real complaint.)

The puzzles were generally not difficult once you uncovered the proper clues. The bookshelf puzzle was the only one I really had an issue with because I was trying to treat it like a rotating dial combination on a safe. I'd guess that tripped more than one player up.

All in all? If you like mysteries? This might be the best one you'll ever play.

8/10. story, gameplay and puzzle set up are all phenomenal. everything is, except for the last scene which is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ terrifying and very jarring.

This is the kind of game design I've been hoping would carry the puzzle/exploration/mystery genre for a long time. Never have I needed to take notes as extensively as I did for this game. I've played all the Myst games and a couple older puzzlers and I've not needed more than one or two notes. I hope this mechanic becomes the norm, no hand holding, no pointers, no hints. I'm playing this a lot later than most who've reviewed it so I won't repeat any of that, but for sure if you like a game that forces you to immerse yourself into the role of an investigator with no clue at all what's going on, give it a shot.

An enjoyable way to spend a weekend if you like murder mysteries. Set in a quaint, unpopulated small town.
Pros:
A compelling story line with like-able characters.
A hub-like progression allowing for multiple leads at times.
Challenging puzzles at times, calling for keen observation skills. You will have to put on your thinking cap and pay attention as some details are small and hidden.
Limited prop interaction, informing PC when the environment has elements that you can interact with. Ex: if it doesn't prompt an unlock, don't waste your time, no key will work. If objects are in the way of a door, it isn't meant to be opened.

Cons:
Variable movement speed depending on area. Sprint mode is very fast through the main town area, quite a bit slower in the sub areas.
Monotonous music loops. While the tunes are mysterious and well composed, they could have been longer or had a few more to break up the monotony.
A lot of back-tracking going from one side of town to the other with yet another key.
Lack of a user journal. Notes are copied automatically from character diaries, newspaper articles etc. It is recommended to take your own with a tag based feature such as Google Keep.

7.5 / 10

Recommendation: pick this one up on sale. If you have a friend or spouse it would make for a good interactive mystery experience for both.