This whole game was just a yikes, I'm sorry... really rough and poor experience

It wasn't all bad. I liked that to find certain items of evidence you needed to rotate the room and look at it from different angles.

Thats where the positivity ends though. The writing start to finish is so bare bones. All the dialogue is just exposition and case details, none of the characters have any nuance or layers to them.

It is also a REALLY ugly looking game. The main character in particular has eyes that are not centered and rolled up to her head. All the character models in general are poor. Some are just copy pasted and they slapped a mustache on them. They have no emotion or differing facial features.

The presentation all around is just poor. If there is music in the game I cannot hear it at all. The mixing is so bad that even when you turn the volume to the max you still barely hear it. And there are hardly any sound effects to begin with. No voice acting.

The rooms themselves have ok detail but they did the bare minimum: they reuse the exact same rooms for several levels, with the same set pieces and items tossed around even if they are not relavent.

The investigative work is also poor. The presentation on it is non existent just a blank screen with the text and then you connect correlating pieces of evidence with lines.

They really made zero attempt at all to make investigating take effort. If there is an incriminating piece of info you need, it is always right next to the suspect in the garbage or just on their table in plain view. And sometimes you just rifle through someone's bag right in front of their face with no ramifications or issues at all.

The whole game just feels lazy and uninspired. I don't dislike most games I play, but this one was just really bad. It has a good skeleton for a game somewhere but there is no meat or substance at all. Skip this one and stay far away.

Murder Mystery Machine (or MMM) is a (puzzle?) game I both bought and picked up on a whim and I'm glad I did! In the game you play as rookie detective called Cass, who is assigned to DCA, a neglected division of the police. Throughout the game you investigate murders and later get tangled up in a bigger conspiracy.

MMM wasn't a mind-blowing game, but it surprised me positively. I liked the overarching conspiracy story and some of the other unrelated cases, but I think some excess fat could have been trimmed as some cases didn't contribute to the story in any way (for example case 7 was supposed to give background info on our teammate Nate, but it was only two lines at the end of it and case 4 was just boring in general). In addition, there were some choices, but I don't think they made any difference during the game as some of them were never mentioned again. Story was quite predictable at times and I usually knew who did what pretty early into the cases. The biggest game mechanic, in which you piece together a web of clues (think of that one meme of Charlie day) by pressing at one of them and then dragging a red string to a related clue was interesting at first, but eventually got boring after doing it over and over throughout the cases. In addition, sometimes it was really difficult to say what linked to what, as I thought something could be related but in reality it just wasn't.

all in all, I don't think MMM is a bad game, but it definitely overuses the same mechanics and would have benefitted from just cutting couple episodes. I'm glad I picked it up though as it made me use my brain once in a while and the story and characters were pretty interesting.

So the game has some good ideas but not all of it is executed properly and what’s there is clearly made with a tiny budget. Even though the priorities were right, I’m not sure what’s there is enough. It’s a detective game where you’re given 8 cases. Each case has between 5 and 6 missions. Each mission is basically one small room where you get to speak with who’s around, examine items and make connections. With the last one, some important words/sentences are collected based on what you find. You use those to combine them with other words/sentences. Based on that, you will get new dialogue options that will give you new clues, so words/sentences to use. Once you’ve went through everything, you’re supposed to decide who’s the suspect, murder weapon, place of crime etc. This part is fun when it works. But a lot of times it’s trial and error, trying to figure out what the devs want you to connect. It’s too specific, the wording is too vague, or some of the connections seemed too easy to bring up again. As you can imagine, this part is very subjective and also very difficult to get right from the perspective of the developers too. There is a hint system that gives you the answers, as in give you one connection each time. However, your score is reduced every time you make use of it. If you’re too prideful or have OCD tendencies, then it might annoy you when you get lower scores based on the words/sentences that were expected of you. You can replay cases after clearing them but I didn’t care enough to go through them again. With budget I mean the fact there is only one room with each case. Some rooms are often used again. There isn’t really a soundtrack and there is no voice acting. Still though I like some of the interactions in the office, like eating donuts and the sound effects.

Even though I didn’t care much about the gameplay anymore, I did care about the story enough. That was the driving force for me finishing the game. It might not seem the case early on but the cases are connected. Even if the ending is not very satisfactory, the rest was worth experiencing once through Apple Arcade. The game might also be worth it on the cheap for fans of the genre but keep your expectations in check.