This is a very uneven game. The first couple of cases excited me with the specificity of the online research required to solve them, but after that for every cool case there were 2 boring/simple ones, and the game never makes good use of all its resources to put pressure on the player (you gain 10x more money than you need to beat it, there's an ingame timer that's rarely used, and it doesn't ask you to fly to other countries all that often). Plus, more and more script issues appear as you reach its end, and... there was so much potential for something really cool on this one, but this isn't the Carmen Sandiego-like I wished it was.

One of the worst games I've ever played. Got pulled in by the art style and found very few redeeming qualities by the end. Awful writing, insufferable characters, stiff and terrible voice acting, audio issues, and bugs galore make this an unsalvageable mess.

Even the unique puzzle mechanic of having to look up information yourself online wears out its welcome as the puzzles become increasingly convoluted.

Don't waste your time with this. Play good games instead.

I'm not gonna talk too much about this because frankly I didn't spend the time in it to warrant, like, rating or reviewing it properly. But the few hours I did prod around were foreboding. My initial excitement towards the game stemmed partially from knowing about its weird structure - you solve a great deal of the puzzles with outside research. Like, there's literally a button in the UI that forces open your PC's default internet browser. And this seemed strange and exciting until the tutorial in which I searched a keyword for the first time and "How to solve [puzzle] Chinatown Detective Agency" was near the top of the results. It's such a strange problem for a game to have, blockades of uncurated (uncuratable? that a word?) information outright poisoning the experience, seemingly through no fault but... naivety? All at once it sorta dawned on me that having puzzles be externally sourced is, for more than one reason, a really fucking bad idea.

And, granted, you could just ignore it if you really wanted to, but considering the game has a built-in hint system that charges your playable character money, which is a resource that actually holds weight in this game, you are really not encouraged to engage honestly with the game by its own admission.

So, while I stuck around for a few more cases (one of which contained a very esoteric puzzle and made the aforementioned google-issue all the more tender), I uninstalled the moment I returned to the desktop - a mystery game with a gaping, shredded hole in its flowchart doesn't instill a lot of confidence and playing games on Game Pass means whatever leash they have on me in normal circumstances might as well be made of Fruit By the Foot here. This wasn't the only red flag either, for what it's worth, but it was the most fascinating easily.

Chinatown Detective Agency
Developed by: General Interactive Co. (@genintco)
Published by: General Interactive Co. (@genintco) & Humble Games (@PlayHumbleGames)

I wanted to like this game but the atrocious save system and buggy nature of the game ruined the experience for me. It’s left me furious. I tried doing everything I could think of to unlock all of the endings and achievements but I'm either missing something incredibly dumb or the game is bugged. Maybe I’m being unfair? I don’t know. I’ve never written a review like this before. The game was great at first. Great voice acting, great pixel art and an interesting story. Unfortunately it all falls apart. I can’t recommend this game. Maybe the steam version is better?

Pros:


Cons:
Save system
The game is buggy

Played on: Xbox Series X via Xbox Game Pass
Review score: 1.5/5

If you love to play a game where you will be spending more time on Google or looking up strategy guides vs actually exploring the game you're playing, Chinatown Detective Agency is a game made for you.

A futuristic Singapore is the setting and it starts off pretty good, but quickly the game loop is uncovered and the game's charming look and interesting location go right out the window.

The game is largely puzzle solving and trying to figure out where to go next. The only problem is that the actual game only provides you with hints and clues and there's no real way to uncover some of these puzzles without being really knowledgeable on a lot of various things or to constantly be Googling quotes, flags, languages, capitals, and a few other topics.

The game doesn't provide you any way of discovering these in game. You either look them up or pay someone in the game to give you the answer. There's the option to get a hint, which also costs money, but it's a waste of time to do.

You can't really just fly/look around until you come up to the place/solution too since some clues have to be manually types out and traveling costs money. The game also features a fun rent system where, at the start of every month, you have to pay your bills. Sounds like fun, doesn't it?

If you run out of money or get trapped/arrested/fail the puzzle, you get a game over and you will restart from the beginning of the case more times than not. The game features an auto save feature that almost always only works at the beginning of the case. You can't save yourself at any time, so if you're worried about running out of money flying around and discovering the next location and want to save so you don't have to go through all the dialogue you've already read, too bad.

Flying around and seeing the various dystopian locations is neat but they are completely empty with nothing to explore besides the screen you will load up when you "land". Most areas that are not necessary to the story are empty husks. Some times new areas will open up if they are story related but I rarely visited most of the locations in the one storyline path I took.

The game provides you with three different clients to work with. At the start, you can work with all three to help get an idea for the case and the story. Eventually though, you will have to pick one to work full time which will ignore the rest of the cases. I only played through one path, so it's possible that these other areas are explored more in other pathways but it just feels like a lot of wasted space.

I played the XBox version of this game as well and there are issues with the console version of this compared to the PC version. Since you have no mouse, you aren't able to just click on the thing you want to interact with, so you'll have to rely on the game automatically hovering over the correct item/person, which this game struggles to do.

So many times I was standing right of front of something but the game instead was focusing on me interacting with something behind me or nearby. There was also a very frustrating puzzle involving getting out of a trap by solving constellations (another Google focused puzzle for me). Getting through the puzzle wasn't too bad, except for the auto focusing. Since two of the puzzles were right next to each other (one was above, the other below it), I was unable to easily click on the final part of the puzzle. After dying twice and having to get back there, I got lucky finally by just pressing A until it recognized the bottom puzzle. I almost quit then and there.

There are other bugs as well, characters just not appearing, or not being able to talk to them, or other various in game issues that just make the whole experience worse. Things where it wasn't as simple as leaving and coming back. Things where I had to literally shut the game down and start from the beginning of the case.

This game has an interesting location, mainly taking place in a futuristic Singapore and the idea could have been good but Chinatown Detective Agency falls well short of being worth your time unless the idea of Google searching your way into progress sounds like a great time

Chinatown Detective Agency

I’ve never played a Carmen Sandiego game or a Carmen Sandiego-like, so I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect from Chinatown Detective Agency. The opening sets up a vast cyberpunk world with philosophical android stuff and that kind of thing. But very quickly, it becomes clear that the game’s real strength is in its knowledge about history and culture.

CDA is Singapore game from Singapore devs intently about Singapore. It’s neat! It’s a passion project intent on teaching some into about countries and stamp history and that sort of thing.

This is best demonstrated within the tutorial cases. The second tutorial case involves hunting down stamp origins. A wealthy heir to a cultist empire is trying to atone for his family’s sins. While he’s preoccupied with bigger family crimes to atone for, he’s secretly hired you to return these stolen historical stamps to their country of origin.

So you get an image of a stamp, and sent off to google. Not some internal google made for the game, clicking web opens up your real browser and encourages you to search away. As much as the game is about global history, it’s also about testing your research skills. The client promises you a bonus if you can provide additional info to the historical society, particularly if the country the stamp is from no longer exists. Not only do you need to track down the country of the stamp, the exact city is crucial for more cash money. Get enough cash money, and you’ll be able to afford the many rent and plane charges ahead of you. And that’s crucial: if you fail to pay rent twice, game over. Start from the beginning and play better.

Other cases follow a similar framework, testing your knowledge and encouraging you to learn more. The storylines often deal in various forms of corruption across the city of Singapore. A company trying to buy the public water to upcharge for “premium” clean water. A church bent on horsing donations for themselves inside of giving to the needy. Cops getting paid by those corporations. Etc.

The game kind of loses me in the final act when it swerves back to its sci fi evil AI plot. It’s just kind of. Not interesting? It loses the realism and charm of the other cases and gets bogged down by philosophical quotes that mean nothing and robots talking about how humanity needs to end. It’s just not about anything real. The stamps? THAT’S real. That’s genuinely interesting. I leaned about lost art and how people identify age and location. That’s neat. What am I learning from an AI talking about

The save system is also just awful. It auto saves occasionally, but you can only save when in-between cases. If you’re in the middle of a case, well, that’s your problem. I vaguely understand that they wanted people to stick with consequences from a failed segment but. Come on. There’s also some glitches with audio not activating if you’ve been playing too long, some weird graphical things. Minor issues that take you out of it.

I do think it’s a great little game that offers a lot of choice and differentiation, but there’s stuff they clearly didn’t have time to improve on that makes it feel underbaked at times.

I covered this game as part of my coverage of the Xbox Game Pass for April 2022

A fresh take on the idea of Carmen Sandiego.

Chinatown Detective Agency is unlike anything else. Most games keep you in their world, and try to keep you playing while making it so you don’t need to turn to google, Chinatown Detective Agency flat out tells you to go search the web. Each mission in this game seems to have the player have to do online research, not of the game world but the real world, and I can’t think of another game that uses this idea.

Unfortunately, the video here should show you why that’s problematic. Twice I searched phrases that took me directly to a walkthrough of Chinatown Detective Agency. Immersion was immediately broken and I’m disappointed both that this wasn’t considered, but also that’s what this game will be eventually. There is a potential solution to put a minus Chinatown at the beginning or end of every search, but even that kind of sucks.

Pick this up if you want a very interesting and unique concept, but do realize that it’s a concept that has a rather big flaw because it’s a game that will constantly tell you to search the internet, and there are people on the internet that are going to try to abuse that, unfortunately. Still, I might give this another shot once I forget how annoying it was to keep running into spoilers.

If you want to see the video this was taken of, or more from me on the Xbox Game Pass, check out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ntlfep_luQw

If the setting (cyberpunk Singapore) appeals to you, or if you're a sucker for detective games, play it. Even fpr all of its faults, Chinatown Detective Agency manages to immerse you in this time and place, and for the majority of its runtime it really feels like you're a detective, thanks to its light sim / management elements, stunning pixel art, and real-world deductions.

Having said all of that, this isn't a polished game at all. Even 6 months after release, it regularly has basic issues that can impact gameplay. They're workable, for sure, and maybe in the future they'll be patched, but some of these issues speak of a general lack of time and resources to edit and polish the final experience. These range from super obtuse puzzles that even the hint system gets wrong, to annoying audio bugs, where most voice-acted lines won't play -- even the ones that are clues for a puzzle!

I also wish there was an in-game browser, with cyberpunk interface and music while I look for the solutions. I also wish everything was voice-acted, or nothing at all, and that the written lines matched what the actors said. I wish the managing elements were a bit more intense and that you could play all client cases in one run (or at least that it had a "point of no return" save to jump to after beating the game). I wish the soundtrack had more tracks and that the ending wasn't bugged so I could get the perfect resolution. Oh well...

Overall, a short and sweet experience that could be easier to recommend in a more polished state. I hope the devs have the opportunity to improve the game or at least apply these learnings to their next project, because the potential is there.

Un buen pixel art, una interfaz mal diseñada pero bien integrada con el juego, un doblaje aceptable y hasta ahí puedo dar bondades de este juego que obliga al jugador a dejar de jugar para buscar pistas en internet (sí, tal como lo digo), con la esperada consecuencia de encontrar en Google numerosas guías del propio juego, lo cual mata cualquier atisbo de interés y desafío para el jugador.

No he llegado a pasar de la tercera misión tutorial porque las dos anteriores me parecieron repetitivas y aburridas, y sólo fueron dos misiones.

El juego se esfuerza en expulsar al jugador fuera en vez de ganarse su atención.

"Googling for answers", which way back when was the ultimate sign of an adventure gamer's resignation, is not a great mechanic. As well-intentioned as it might be, Chinatown Detective Agency's feature of making research outside of the game into an integral part of the game effectively kills it.

At first, it comes off as a joke. A dig aimed at anyone who's rushed to GameFAQs as soon as they hit a wall (hey, it still might be). But soon it becomes apparent that no, the game actually wants you to hit the web and look up real-world history or geography to get past a puzzle. Ironic considering that this lovely pixelated near-future world leaves computers, smartphones even a library (you know, that ancient repository of information and knowledge) at your disposal.

It's not the entire game. There's plenty of in-game sleuthing, shooting, and talking for sure. In the end, though, it's just disruptive to the gameplay and takes the player out of it. Which, you know, is not really a great thing when you want them immersed in the sci-fi-murder-mystery at hand.