Little Problems: A Cozy Detective Game

I had high hopes for this game, as I enjoy puzzle and cozy games, but I found the whole experience really tedious, and the characters uninteresting and unremarkable. I don’t understand why the developers thought it was a good idea to make you fill in the name of the main characters (which are shared across the 10 levels) on almost every level. It is so unnecessary. Having to constantly switch around between clues is not super fun either. I wish there was a way to see all the clues from the “Solve” tab. The game runs on Linux with Proton (9.0-4) without any issues.

It is okay. Basically, a slightly lower quality game that resembles Duck Detective. If you're itching for more DD, you should get it. My biggest criticism is that with the exception of the last case it is more a "piece together what happened" than "piece together a mystery", however, I am not sure what it would take for a 10-case game with mystery after mystery. Played on Linux without issues.

The game follows Mary and her friends/family during their first semester/year? at college. I'd recommend this to anyone who wants a short, easy cozy puzzle game with a cute art style. The story was cute. The game was very easy to 100%, especially with the help of the hint button. It was definitely sequel bated. The game play mechanics are point and click, and you are basically solving little scenarios filling out who, what, where, etc. Very similar to the Duck Detective series if you have played that. It was a little short for me for $10, but definitely grab if it goes on sale!

The game story was boring and the puzzles were more brute force than actually deduction. Having to click back to "clues" constantly to fill in the same information over and over again with no reward on an engaging plot or carry over from prior cases made the game less interesting as it progressed. Cute concept, poor execution.

Mary is dressed as a detective in the cover image of this game, which is extremely misleading. Any "solving" is done by you and you alone, a third-person omniscient outsider who is looking at a scene with information deliberately and meaninglessly obscured for no other reason than to mildly confuse any higher-dimensional being watching. And I put solving in quotes because it's really more just "describe what is happening in this scene". There's even an example in the first two preview images; if this was an actual mystery game, you'd expect to have to go and solve the mystery of "who/what broke the USB stick" or "why was Mary late and what for". But... well, the cat is chewing on the USB stick right in front of you. And in image 2, you can see the mystery was apparently "what are the names of Mary's presentation partners?" and "what day will they have a follow up meeting about this group presentation?". Man, I think "low-stakes mystery" can definitely be done but that is bringing the term down to an entirely different level... Comparisons have already been made to Golden Idol and Obra Dinn but I think the shortcomings would be applicable to any mystery game, no matter the mechanics. The most annoying forced-info-obfuscation was that a character's full name is never put in a single place, you ALWAYS have to hunt for the first and second seperately. This includes when people are literally holding identification or credit cards. There was no logic to when or why people used [First Initial]. Lastname vs Firstname [Last Initial]. or just initials alone. And you have to do this repeatedly even for characters you've known since the first chapter. One of the last chapters has Mary, for whatever reason, refer to all of her family members by their normal human names except for Silvia, who she writes down as "S" for the first time in the entire game. ?????????????????? This added no mystery, just busywork as we have to go and pixel hunt for wherever Silvia's name is actually written. I don't think that this sort of game inherently needs a densely-woven story, but even this extremely light plot had missed opportunities to entwine itself with the mechanics/genre. Maybe I'm biased because it's pride month, but here's an example; we're supposed to assume that Silvia and Alex are getting engaged because they both have silver rings, but it's not explicitly confirmed in the chapter. Alex shows up once again later at the vet, wearing the same silver ring. He's sat next to a very trendy-looking Kevin who is there because his dog swallowed... a ring. How satisfying would it have been to discover that it was actually Alex and Kevin getting married, perhaps having proposed with the breakout design from fashion-industry-newbie Silvia? A red herring, a twist, and being able to piece it all together yourself from subtle hints- well, no, Alex and Silvia do get engaged. It's fine, it's just no mystery. All that said, I enjoyed it decently enough. The character designs are very cute and I hope they come back for the developer's future games. Fair warning - I don't regret supporting indie devs but it's too expensive for what it is, even on the sale I bought it for.

游戏内容翻译私自延伸导致推理障碍的部分： 第八关教授的笔记 “In his group, one of the least creative presentation.” 不应该翻译为“在他的小组中，他的课堂展示极度缺乏创意” “Must have studied with Sara.” 不应该翻译为“肯定是跟萨拉学的” 这两个译者想当然的延伸会导致没办法通过其他队友的成绩推测出H.V.的成绩，很无厘头 其他部分还不错

——记录：捆绑包“Safe In Our World Charity Bundle” ，26/02/08入。 ——儿童向、重记名、轻解密小游戏。26/06/10

Very cute game and I appreciate that they don't penalize you for using hints! The art is adorable and the storylines are very wholesome. And it's nice that the story does feel like you spent a year with the characters and got to see them grow.