Detective: The Motel Xbox Series X Review 4.5/10 "A Motel That Could Use a Lick of Paint" 🔎🏨 #GameDev #IndieGame @K148_GS @JanduSoft

A game made by a solo developer, Detective: The Motel puts you in the well-trodden shoes of a detective that has arrived at a roadside motel to solve a murder. In order to complete your investigation, you are given a task sheet that lists 15 points that must be solved in order to close the case. 

You must discover key points such as the murderer, the victim, who the other tenants of the motel are, as well as which rooms in which they dwell. My initial thoughts were positive, yes the game felt very ‘asset-y’, there was minimal music (aside from the menu music which was reminiscent of Bronski Beat’s Smalltown Boy – good), and it was all set in a small building – but these are to be expected when a game is made on such a small budget, and these limitations can result in extremely tight, potent gameplay and narrative.

The game advises you to grab a notepad and paper to make notes – which I did – and I them settled down with a whisky to get to the bottom of this fiendish crime!

The game begins with absolutely no scene setting, no text introduction, you are just plonked outside a motel surrounded by invisible barriers and must begin your investigation. Each room has number-based puzzles such as locked laptops, mobile phones etc. or environmental-based puzzles that must be solved in order to proceed, I was getting into this, but did find the lack of any sort of pre-amble or atmosphere a bit vacant, aside from some voice recordings, the game is mostly silent. 

Without wishing to spoil the puzzles here, what ended up happening is, a very short while later, I had deduced everything about the murder with the exception of the number of the rooms in which the tenants resided, and as it seemed a bit redundant as I’d solved the murder itself - I just guessed them, and... that was it. The game doesn’t play any pleasing sounds or acknowledgements when you get a part of the investigation correct, the number on the screen just moves from 0/15 to 1/15 with no fanfare. 

Even when I completed the game, the screen came up with some information on one of the characters in the game, and I assumed that it was going to play out the background of the murder and why it happened, but it just locked on that screen and I ended up having to quit out of the game, so I’m not sure if it crashed or if that was the intended result, but that’s how my game ended.

There’s a lot of promise here, and I do enjoy the thought of a detective game set in a single location that has you solving the crime, but Detective: The Motel is so devoid of any sort of setup or atmosphere that it’s hard to feel engaged in the gameplay. It also feels quite unbalanced, for instance – I solved the murder without actually entering one of the rooms, and finding the murder weapon wasn’t a major point of the investigation, which struck me as odd, that the murder weapon wasn’t of interest – but the room numbers of the motel were.

SUMMARY
There’s a neat idea here, and I hope that k148 Game Studio hones in on the good and trims some of the bad, as they could have a niche audience of keen detectives out there, someday.

4.5/10

💦MELTED💦