Chinatown Detective Agency is a very good adventure game that mixes old-school concepts across several genres into a set of mysteries that are replayable. While it isn’t perfect due to its saving system and some minor mechanic issues, it offers up a fun experience in the long run.
Humble Games and General Interactive, Co. have put together an interesting adventure game. While it wants to be a traditional point-and-click adventure, it is anything but that, which makes it stand out because of all the right reasons (we will get to those shortly). While the game is certainly a mixed bag of nuts in functionality, its story intentions harken back to the early 90s when adventure games were just sprouting.
Let’s get right into it.
Old fashion whodunnit
The story of Chinatown Detective Agency follows former Singapore cop Amira, who is trying to start up a detective agency. She works with former associates to help kickstart her business but eventually starts gathering clients on her own. As she gets more clients, she finds herself flying worldwide to solve mysteries. Her world becomes much bigger than just solving cheap murders in Singapore.
The story behind Chinatown Detective Agency is wide in scope and at times a bit all over the place. The game’s story throws you into the mix and contains one of the longer tutorials that you don’t know you’re playing. You get a series of small cases to get used to detecting and the controls, then the game shifts to one of its main storylines about a potentially corrupt mega-temple whose leader might have been murdered. The mysteries shift from small to multi-chapter involved. I like the variety at first, but the game seemed to find its legs with the first big temple mystery. That said, having micro mysteries to solve instead of a giant case would have been just fine in my opinion. It would have kept the game fresh, but at the same time provided the opportunity for players to experience a buffet of gameplay options. Either way, there is some good experience to be had through the stories provided.
While the game has a variety of stories, I think it does have an issue where mechanics for one story are introduced and then never heard from again across several mysteries. There was a mission where Amira brandished a gun and had to take out a suspect through a point/shoot method. This was an action element introduced in the game and one that opened a range of possibilities and potential for gameplay. While the mechanic was introduced at the beginning of the game, which implied it was important, it doesn’t show up again for hours upon hours. While the game’s story isn’t branded as an action game, then why introduce this mechanic to the story, if you’re not going to use it as a gameplay option for the player? It’s like buying a tool at home and saying, “Someday down the road I’m going to use it to build something” but you never do. Why even introduce that tool if that was not going to happen immediately in the story or at least a couple of hours in? And it’s not like there wasn’t a potential for that to be used in the first big story of the game. The end part of the first mission involves guns and the perfect opportunity to bring this mechanic back up, but Amira becomes a pacifist for whatever reason. In the scheme of things, underused mechanics aren’t bad. Just a tad wasteful and cherry-picked, especially when moments of the story potentially could call for it.
Mechanics aside, the game’s story is mostly dialogue-driven with its content, as adventure games tend to be. You will run into occasional choices in the dialogue and non-linear shifts in the story, but prepare yourselves for a lot of reading, which isn’t bad. That’s pretty much how I spent my late 80s and most 90s with LucasArts. The dialogue does lead into puzzle-solving and detective work, as it should in this adventure game, and does also bridge to interactive hot-spots in the game. Solving a mystery in an adventure game does require you to be mindful of the dialogue, as it is the heart of the gameplay.
Sticking with the dialogue, the game does ask something very Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego from its players. The dialogue is uber important to find clues lying within. Sometimes those clues will lead you to solutions, much like our red-hatted thief from yesteryear. A good chunk of your experience is when the story throws you for a loop and asks you to go online to find information. No, no – not online through the game, physically online through your phone. While I won’t go into the “did they consider the digital divide in the world and technology accessibility” problem, which is still a huge problem in this world, I will say this is a unique mechanic to throw into the storytelling. It really felt like a modern-day Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego experience, where the virtual world meets the real world and tracking down clues through Google brings answers that are not otherwise available to the player. I can see people taking this mechanic the wrong way and saying this is lazy on the developers’ part, but honestly, it’s clever and makes the adventure game a bit less self-contained, and I can dig that direction. It also opens the story possibilities quite a bit.
In addition to the real-world mechanics, the game does offer up the ability to call clients, informants, and real estate agents (explained later). It also allows you to gather evidence, travel across a vast cityscape, and fly around the world. While the controls for all of this are simple, the options do open a wide range of possibilities for how the story could potentially go. These mechanics are a sprinkle of Snatcher, which is welcomed, where you can go different places, talk to multiple people, and essentially have the world at your fingertips. Sometimes that is good, sometimes it can equal a dead end. All of it just makes the Chinatown Detective Agency’s world bigger. By the way, if you have never played that late 80s Hideo Kojima classic, then learn Japanese and buy a TG-16 mini. That’s the only way Konami is going to let you play it. It is an amazing classic.
Getting back to the narratives, the stories are intriguing in Chinatown Detective Agency. While I’ll admit that I could see ‘whodunnit’ more than not because we’re not talking Agatha Christie mysteries here, how they were built up, and what personalities they contained along the way made for a good narrative time. The folks at General Interactive did a solid job with their storytelling. You’ll enjoy this part of the game very much.
More than meets the eye
What’s fascinating about Chinatown Detective Agency is how this adventure game sells itself. Most adventure games are of the point-and-click fashion. No doubt that it has all the bones of a P/C game. There are interactive hot spots all over the game, some useful and some not. It has all the structure of a typical adventure game, which is great because that’s how it sells itself.
Then it shifts.
Once you get beyond the basic tutorials that show you how most of the mechanics work, the game decides to throw the entire genre out of whack (in a good way). Chinatown Detective Agency tells you that you must worry about paying bills and keeping the lights on, which is more simulator than adventure. It also opens the possibility of expanding your detective agency the better you do. You can hire a real estate agent and make your office bigger. Why make it bigger? Well, you’re going to have employees and expand the business, so you need more space. With more space, comes more bills. With more bills, comes more cases that must be worked on. Yeah, the game gets incredibly more complicated with all the above, but delightfully more complicated because it’s more than just a ‘solve this case’ experience. It’s now a balancing act that, at least for me, feels like a bargain for $24.99, even if the stories are predictable at times.
When you aren’t choosing space and hiring employees, you’re working cases. Your time is money and bills are due every month, so be mindful of that because if you miss bills, you end the game. Again, it’s a balance. Another factor the game makes you aware of outside of time is travel. If you travel within the game, you must pay for airfare. You have about 15+ locations to choose from and each has a day/time that flights leave, which also means you must be mindful of when you arrive at the airport. How this specific element correlates with all the above is that you want to make sure you know where you are going and why. If you waste money on a dead-end lead, you’ve wasted time and money. The less money you have, the more you’re going to lose when bills come due.
Yes, this is essentially a fun business simulator.
Now, another wrench thrown into the typical adventure gameplay experience is that you must choose a single character in the game to work with who supplies you with enough cases to live. You’re introduced to all the players through the tutorial and given enough background for each that you understand what you’re getting into once you make that choice. Once you sign with them, there is no going back unless you save the game prior to that choice (recommended) or you complete the game (fail or succeed). Some of the characters have cases that you can make money from and live/thrive, while others are more blue-collar level pay, but have other benefits. Regardless of choice, you get a different set of adventures that lead you down different paths. This is also called branching narratives, and it also makes the game replayable.
All the above make for a different type of adventure, which is honestly a welcomed one for the genre that has been flooded with games.
Biggest complaint
While my experience with Chinatown Detective Agency has been mostly positive because of what it is trying to branch off and do, the biggest irritation with this game is how it saves. While I commend General Interactive for wanting to keep the player focused and not half-in/out of the story by essentially trapping them in the gameplay until the autosave kicks in, I found it quite inconvenient that I could not just save at any given time during the game. In the beginning, there was no option to save, and you must depend on the game reaching the end of a case and autosaving. When you get to the first big story, which introduces the previously mentioned gameplay elements, the game tells you that you can save manually, but restricts the option to either prior to the middle of the game or when the case ends. How is that manually saving? I can tell you that I started over on a case three times due to this saving gameplay decision and found it just irritating. The great thing about manually saving, even if it’s in the middle of a case, is that if life happens suddenly, then you can rest assured that all the hour-long effort you’ve made isn’t going to be lost.
This is an element of the game that sincerely needs to be more flexible.
Adventuring
I didn’t have much that I disliked about this game other than some inconsistent mechanics and annoying save features. Ultimately, Chinatown Detective Agency is a fun adventure game that takes chances and introduces some old concepts into a new set of stories. It is a fun adventure that has some replayability and one that should have a sequel sometime down the road. There is enough in this game to justify the $24.99 price tag and then some.
Let’s wrap this up.
Conclusion
Chinatown Detective Agency is a very good adventure game that mixes old-school concepts across several genres into a set of mysteries that are replayable. While it isn’t perfect due to its saving system and some minor mechanic issues, it offers up a fun experience in the long run.
