A good setting and while it often involves combat it at least doesn't have you fighting the style of threats you should have absolutely no chance against like some other Cthulhu games but the combat is never good enough and it involves too much busywork.
The investigation mechanic is too basic with pixel hunting on the harder difficulties and easily being able to piece things together with the main gimmick being the need to frequently look up records in the library, city hall, police HQ, and newspaper to find the address of people and places. Fast traveling to those locations and walking to the place you discover is where much of the time is spent. It's unfortunate these mechanics weren't better handled with the developers long running series of Sherlock Holmes games.
Cases often give you two or three ways to handle the finale and what side characters live or die but it never actually effects anything that meaningful except maybe a brief vision later or a few different lines. Even choices warning you that it will increase the spread of madness in the city never actually do much of anything. The game is too focused on finding crafting components to make more ammo, main and side quest rewards are ammo and components (sometimes a new gun), skills are mostly based on combat and crafting and there are infected areas of the city with good loot that require you to fight or avoid a lot of enemies (probably spending a lot of the loot you are acquiring anyway) that I just ignored. You have a sanity meter that never really matters, if it gets low enough hallucinations might attack you. The most interesting thing it did was create a hallucination of a fake box that gave me items when I searched it and then vanished.
The lower budget does show through in animations, walk cycles, bugs.
It can be an ok but repetitive playthrough if you like the theme. It did have one of my favorite NPC interactions in a game though https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1765647639973089742
The investigation mechanic is too basic with pixel hunting on the harder difficulties and easily being able to piece things together with the main gimmick being the need to frequently look up records in the library, city hall, police HQ, and newspaper to find the address of people and places. Fast traveling to those locations and walking to the place you discover is where much of the time is spent. It's unfortunate these mechanics weren't better handled with the developers long running series of Sherlock Holmes games.
Cases often give you two or three ways to handle the finale and what side characters live or die but it never actually effects anything that meaningful except maybe a brief vision later or a few different lines. Even choices warning you that it will increase the spread of madness in the city never actually do much of anything. The game is too focused on finding crafting components to make more ammo, main and side quest rewards are ammo and components (sometimes a new gun), skills are mostly based on combat and crafting and there are infected areas of the city with good loot that require you to fight or avoid a lot of enemies (probably spending a lot of the loot you are acquiring anyway) that I just ignored. You have a sanity meter that never really matters, if it gets low enough hallucinations might attack you. The most interesting thing it did was create a hallucination of a fake box that gave me items when I searched it and then vanished.
The lower budget does show through in animations, walk cycles, bugs.
It can be an ok but repetitive playthrough if you like the theme. It did have one of my favorite NPC interactions in a game though https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1765647639973089742