The Crimson Debt
released on Dec 17, 2023
You've lived your whole life in a single basement. Now, your cage is unlocked. You could leave this house at any moment you want. But without knowing what happened, can you ever truly be free?
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This game has so much potential and it was so engaging for most of its run. It's setup is really interesting, it forces you to keep your own notes and make your own deductions and the presentation, while minimal, is effective. I have to commend how much work this is for a game made in such a short span of time, this was clearly a passion project and I will be checking out their other games in future.
Now, with that said, the ending and the solution to the crime is bad. This is not a game that you can logically intuit most of what you need to come to a complete deduction. You have to make WILD assumptions and leaps in logic to get to the solution, with so many details just not being properly hinted at in some ways. Some of the evidence is poorly explained, through the (admittedly pretty good) prose of the author, some details about what the evidence is gets lost and left feeling incomplete as a result.
I managed to get far with my deduction, I played on the puritan difficulty because I had faith in the game to be solvable with everything present. Half of my deduction was correct with the other half being pure guesswork. I had to abuse the intuition mechanic near the end of the game to even get the ending, because I had solved all but 1 persons fate, and that final person was so asinine in the way the game wants you to describe their death, it was awful.
The deduction screen lets the game down awfully, because motives can be so broad or vague in what they mean that you might think you know what its going for but need a different motive that fits it slightly better. It's not intuative and just fumbles greatly.
The ending deduction is one of the worst I've seen due to how much information you just aren't able to know from the evidence given to you, this is not a deduction that can be made with such certainty yet it feels like its telling you "Yeah this is obviously how all the evidence lines up", The relationships between characters are practically impossible to guess beyond a point but the final deduction expects you to know their personal histories to a absurd degree to just guess. The final speech felt unearned, the idea is there, but it left a bad taste in my mouth.
This game really let me down in the end, and this is a open apology to my girlfriend who I had play through the game with me, I am so sorry we spent so much time on this game for a solution that bad.
This debt is one I must carry now. Damn you The Crimson Debt.
Now, with that said, the ending and the solution to the crime is bad. This is not a game that you can logically intuit most of what you need to come to a complete deduction. You have to make WILD assumptions and leaps in logic to get to the solution, with so many details just not being properly hinted at in some ways. Some of the evidence is poorly explained, through the (admittedly pretty good) prose of the author, some details about what the evidence is gets lost and left feeling incomplete as a result.
I managed to get far with my deduction, I played on the puritan difficulty because I had faith in the game to be solvable with everything present. Half of my deduction was correct with the other half being pure guesswork. I had to abuse the intuition mechanic near the end of the game to even get the ending, because I had solved all but 1 persons fate, and that final person was so asinine in the way the game wants you to describe their death, it was awful.
The deduction screen lets the game down awfully, because motives can be so broad or vague in what they mean that you might think you know what its going for but need a different motive that fits it slightly better. It's not intuative and just fumbles greatly.
The ending deduction is one of the worst I've seen due to how much information you just aren't able to know from the evidence given to you, this is not a deduction that can be made with such certainty yet it feels like its telling you "Yeah this is obviously how all the evidence lines up", The relationships between characters are practically impossible to guess beyond a point but the final deduction expects you to know their personal histories to a absurd degree to just guess. The final speech felt unearned, the idea is there, but it left a bad taste in my mouth.
This game really let me down in the end, and this is a open apology to my girlfriend who I had play through the game with me, I am so sorry we spent so much time on this game for a solution that bad.
This debt is one I must carry now. Damn you The Crimson Debt.