Dahlia View

I can’t recommend Dahlia View in its current state. In just one hour of play, the game crashed around 10 times! The lock picking puzzle couldn’t be solved on my handheld due to a bug, and the bag flying around like it lost gravity completely breaks the experience. It’s a shame, because the game is genuinely beautiful, with well-drawn environments and good voice acting. Collecting clues was fun, and I enjoyed the puzzles—even if they were a bit too easy. But the clue board, where you draw a red thread between clues, was just a boring chore.

DATE WRITTEN = 09-21-2025. I finished Dahlia View (adventure/mystery game) on Steam (PC). Took like 22h or so. More so than anything, the story was great, which has some excellent twists & turns in the story. Game was good, as you investigate a missing person in the 50's in a small tight-knit neighbor. In this game, you mostly solve puzzles and stuff of that sort. You play as Conway, a retired investigator who is now in a wheelchair - so, yes, you will move around and roll around areas & even need to use the wheelchair to your advantage to solve a few puzzles. Since you need to learn the control schemes - esp. w/ the game-pad, as left stick is used to move forward and back & right stick spins the wheelchair around - so, you'll need to get used to this. Once you do, it's just a super-cool mechanic here and makes me feel like I am Conway, which is great on the immersion factor. Also, this game oozes personality & immersion with its characters and also w/ the way you can investigate almost any object, look at it up close, move it and spin the object around, and manipulate the object in many ways - which reminds me a lot of Gone Home and Shenmue. There's plenty of Lore to read and find, so you can understand these characters (who they are, their background, and why they are the way they are) and to also try to solve this mystery. From HLTB (How Long To Beat), looks like many finished in the 9-12h arena. It took me a lot more (22.3h), as I did get mainly stuck on what feels like "pixel hunt" type of stuff - finding that one thing I need to move on, one area I missed, or one piece of evidence to progress the story - since there's often so much to interact with. So, that meant lots of backtracking to find that "one missing thing". Puzzles weren't difficult or how to crack, as they weren't say Myst series type of difficult. Puzzles and whatnot were not that hard here, as most were easy and logical - but it often felt like I was just missing that one thing to move on. Regardless, game ran great and looked fine at 1080p60fps most of the time. Story, character, and plot stuff was great. Immersion factor was great. And the game itself was pretty good, feeling like a classic adventure game w/ some modern twists to it. Easy recommendation here. It was really good, at the very least.

I really wanted to like this game because of all of the great reviews; however, I primarily play with a controller and this game was too difficult to move around with a controller. Even when I switched to keyboard, I had difficulty. I don't like that you can't move the view around to see your surroundings. I couldn't even get out of Conway's apartment building to go speak to the McKees. When I got to what I thought was the front door of the apartment complex, there wasn't an option to interact with the door so I was stuck in the lobby. Also, from just about an hour of gameplay, I find it odd how quick this retired PI is to jump to conclusions. For the first hour, all you do is take pictures, navigate your character, and listen to a bunch of dialog. You don't even get to make dialog decisions. I do enjoy the art style though, so there is that positive note. Overall, it turned out to just not be for me.

Troppo narrativo, poco videoludico. L'Indagine è troppo guidata e manovrata dal narratore. Sia il protagonista che il giocatore restano nel buio più totale fino all'ultimo momento. Si gioca ma non ci si sente coinvolti. Non c'è margine di azione. Tutto ciò che ci viene permesso è di unire i puntini che gli sviluppatori ci hanno preparato, che tra l'altro a lavoro ultimato continuano a non dirci nulla. Non ci è permesso di risolvere da soli il caso ma neppure di fallire. Ciò che con Dahlia View si è ottenuto è una visual novel tridimensionale dai controlli scomodi e frustranti unita alla risoluzione di piccoli labirinti da risolvere in carrozzella, quindi cercando rampe, ascensori e codici. Non è proprio quello che uno si aspetta quando legge slogan del tipo "Prendi l'indagine nelle tue mani". Magari da provare per le atmosfere alla Hitchcock; con una Londra che sembra il Bronx, ma che cattura l'occhio. Ma temo non ci sia altro di positivo da dire.

各人自扫门前雪，休管他人瓦上霜

Usually when i have a neutral opinion on the game, I just plaster "recommended" there. However, this one is an exception. This is a beautiful-looking game with lovely sound design and great characters. Is it buggy? Well, it's Unreal Engine, so that should answer the question. Plenty of bugs. Some stall progress. Some are softlocks. Some are hardlocks. Way too many HUD locks. Way too often input won't work properly or at all. Way too often cameras don't switch as they should, leaving you to move your character while the camera faces a blurry wall/box/pot/curtain/car texture. However, despite the constant bug frustration, I would gladly look past them and post a good review if it was a good detective game. And a good detective game it was not. Where it fails miserably is at writing. This is not a detective story. It has detective elements, but a villain jumping like a Jack in the box in the literal last three minutes of the game (I am not exaggerating - not even the last chapter, it is in the very end of an epilogue) is just bad writing. A detective game should lead the player to uncover the mystery on their own, they should feel invested, they should feel smart, and they absolutely should be able to place the pieces of puzzle on their own and get without the shadow of a doubt who their perpetrator is. And what we get, is them jumping out all of a sudden, looking like salmon hiding in raspberry bushes. Eliminating suspects was good, and ngl, the first suspect I had was the one that actually was the criminal, but just because this is how it usually works in real life - not a single(!) thing until a revelation at the end of "I am an assistant dentist" even remotely hinted at them, and that's just a bad story. You don't do plot twists with no leads to them for detectives. It feels cheap and disappointing - as if nothing you did for the whole ten hours of gameplay mattered at all. An insult to the player, and no one likes being insulted.

Dahlia View is a narrative mystery game set in 1950s England, where you investigate the disappearance of a young boy in a quiet suburban neighborhood. The story unfolds slowly through exploration, conversations, and careful observation, with a strong focus on atmosphere and character. I loved it. The tone is calm but heavy, the writing is excellent, and the setting feels very lived-in and believable. It takes its time, but in a way that really works — letting the mystery sink in and gradually become more unsettling. There’s very little “gamey” stuff here, and that’s exactly why it works so well. It’s a thoughtful, mature mystery that trusts the player and stays with you long after it ends.

It is a very intriguing adventure game that focuses on you spying on your neighbours. Have you ever wanted to monitor what your neighbours are doing but were too weirded out to actually do it? Well this game's for you! Well, not really, as there's a sizeable exploration part of the game as well, but it's fun that snooping is such a big part of the game. The setting of post-ww2 England is interesting to explore and seeing all the new stuff like electricity and plastics being incorporated into common housing is pretty cool. I looked through some other reviews and was surprised to see others praise the game's voiceover a lot, when for me it was kinda the lowest part of the game. The main hero especially constantly mumbles and whispers his lines, and I wouldn't have an idea about half of the things he said if I didn't have subtitles on. The volume levels go from whisper quiet to loud talking, so that doesn't help things either. I also didn't enjoy how slow every conversation was. I get what they were trying to go for here, "natural conversation", but they really overcorrected in the slowness department. Also, it's a minor part of the game, but I really enjoyed how lockpicking minigame succesfully abstracts trying to hold multiple pins at once into forcing you to hold awkward button combinations on the keyboard, that was very effective in conveying that you're doing something that requires a lot of finger dexterity. All in all, if you enjoy point and click adventure games, you should probably give this a go, even though it isn't really one, it might as well be it.

I enjoyed the game, even though I hated solving the detective board puzzles. This one is for the die hard puzzlers, but I was still happy that I could solve 90% of the exploration puzzles.