Inspector Waffles Early Days

[h1]Retro Charm to Feline Investigation[/h1] The feline inspector returns; this time in his early career. Early Days tells a series of short crime cases, each taking about 30 minutes to crack. Interrogating suspects, cross-referencing clues, and wrapping up with a final case report create a satisfying investigative loop. The puzzles are straightforward enough to keep the story flowing, while optional “Mad Catter” challenges add extra difficulty and reward sharp exploration skills. Clues even carry over between cases, making progress feel interconnected. Presented in a lovingly authentic Game Boy Color style, the game embraces chunky 8-bit visuals and chiptune audio. The developers even made it possible to run on real GBC hardware, which adds a special touch of nostalgia for longtime players. Fans of the original Inspector Waffles will feel right at home wandering the animal-inhabited city again, though they’ll need to accept the deliberate “tech regression” in presentation. For newcomers, this prequel is a light, engaging entry point into the world of Waffles - compact and refreshingly different.

Short and cute! (very intense case too) It was nice working with inspector Pancakes :') Also love that we get to see the first meetings with all the co-workers and friends of Waffles

Inspector Waffles: Early Days is a somewhat "demade" prequel to Inspector Waffles, styled as a Game Boy Color game. More than styled, in fact; the game actually *is* a Game Boy Color game running inside a bespoke emulator, and, in fact, comes alongside a ROM in .gb format that can be played in your emulator of choice, or loaded onto a flash cart and played on hardware. Of course, this level of retro fidelity, while awesome in its own right, comes with its share of limitations. Gone is the smoky, hard-boiled jazz soundtrack of the original, replaced with a chiptune soundtrack that, while solid in its own right, doesn't have the same feel of detective noir. More serious than that, however, are the limitations on the game's script; there's only so much room in a valid GBC ROM, after all, and only so much screen space available, so the dialogue comes off as condensed, stripped of a lot of the flavour of the original game. It can also be difficult to follow long dialogue scenes, since the all-caps, fixed-width font (which I assume was chosen to save ROM space) is not the easiest thing to read, and the text is not written with the volume of the text boxes in mind, meaning that a great many individual sentences are spread out across several boxes. The dialogue is also overloaded with "singular they" rubbish, though it appears to be the result of a political-correcting editing pass that wasn't entirely completed; toward the end of the game, the wall of wrong backs off a bit, and we begin to hear characters referred to as "he" again for a while, which is a breath of fresh air. On the brighter side, the core gameplay of Inspector Waffles is still largely intact; you investigate crime scenes, collect clues, and interrogate suspects, trying to determine the truth. There's a new wrinkle, though; rather than the main story taking care of itself while the player solves smaller puzzles, this time you're called upon to solve the cases yourself; a case ends when you decide to make your report to Pancakes, and he'll ask you a series of questions (whodunit and so forth). Not all of these questions are just mechanical "repeat the answer we already told you" questions, either; frequently you have to think about what clues you've gathered and deduce a solution to the case that makes sense. This is a very fun mechanic, hampered only by the fact that, as with all deduction games, it's very hard to get the balance "just right," since it's so unforgiving. What's too easy for one player is too hard for another, with very little daylight between. As such, Inspector Waffles: Early Days leans strongly toward the easy side. To make up for this challenge deficit in the main storyline, the game has a series of "secret" puzzles, one in each case, that have to be solved consecutively. Together, they form a sort of "sub-story" solved alongside the main story, and it's much more challenging. This was my favourite part of the game by far, and it does have an interesting reward for completing it. There is also one more extra-hard puzzle in the game as well, for those who are up for a very serious challenge; again, it's not mandatory (there's not even an achievement linked to it), so it's there only for the real puzzle hunters. Overall, Inspector Waffles: Early Days is a solid pickup. It's only a few hours long, and it may seem a bit "flat" compared to the first Inspector Waffles game, but its good qualities definitely outshine its issues. There's a lot of clever material here, and gameplay rather different from anything else on the Game Boy Color.

Cortito, pero buen juego de Game Boy que causa cierta nostalgia

Great prequel to the first game, love the game boy vibes.

Very cozy and nostalgic, rather short game, loved the soundtrack ^^ Good old days when Inspector Waffles was a strict anti-milk-drinker and played by the rules ^^

A bit different than the first game, they went with a game boy aesthetics for better or worse, instead of a more traditional point and click. While it does give the game a unique style, and feel, it also makes the gameplay a bit jank, due to the limitations the game impose on itself while adhering to a specific style, that limits what can be done. Main problem is the text that is quite annoying to read since so few characters fit on the screen. The controls are also stiff, you movie in a grid and there are invisible walls everywhere even if it looks like you can walk past something and it's pretty hard to see what some things are (something the game makes some tongue-in-cheek jokes about). Nothing major, and it was a intentional design choice so you can't fault the game for it, other than point them out you can make of it what you want. If you think you will hate the gameplay due to how it looks, you probably will, and on the other hand, if you love this style, you will love the game. It has the same charm and silly cat/dog jokes as the first game, The actual cases are fairly easy, but the side quest where there is one part of the big puzzle in each map has some head scratching parts. As long as you don't report in to your partner, you can still find it even after solving the case, so you can't really lock yourself out, and it's pretty obvious what are part of that puzzle and what is part of your main case. I liked the game overall, but I can't say I loved the choice for going for a game boy color style, might very well be that I don't have nostalgia for the format, so that's partially on me.