Mystery of the Malign

I love this game, it's premise and aesthetic is brilliant. The atmosphere is suitably eerie. The mystery is engaging and really fun to unravel and its immensely satisfying to experience a eureka moment when everything fits into place. With all game's in this genre there are frustrations at times when it feels like you're not progressing or when the information you have to remember keeps piling up and you're not sure how much of the case you should have surmised, but I do feel that the game does a good job at hinting towards what you should be doing or where you should be looking for clues just by talking to npc's and breaking down the case into smaller chunks. It definitely helped that I had a friend in the backseat pointing out things I missed or leading me investigate things I hadn't thought of.

Genuinely a really cool game that scratches that mystery itch

This is an excellent free-form detective game. It does very little to guide the player or usher them along, which will not be for everyone, but I loved the freedom to snoop and make my own connections. This also means there's tons of superfluous information and red herrings to stumble across, so you'll likely be a bit clueless some of the time, but it all comes together beautifully. The game also doesn't require you solve absolutely everything to progress the story, I certainly didn't. I would love for some of the keys to be better labelled and for the lighter to produce [i]slightly[/i] more light, currently it's just barely better than walking in complete darkness.

So much promise, but really could have used some "keep it simple stupid." Way too much text, way too many systems, way too many options... It feels like it's just stuff for stuff's sake. The whole "hey here's a massive book of paranormal slapped in your face" drained the last bit of fun out for me.

Really makes you feel like you're a real detective slowly unraveling what happened. Going from stumbling around. completely clueless, finding random stuff which you have no idea what it means, to slowly making theories and finding evidence to what actually happened. Its really challenging though, i "completed" the game without figuring out anything on my first attempt. So multiple playthroughs are kind of necessary.

A tricky self guided investigation

An interesting showcase of detective work taken way too literally, including all the downtimes - endless backtracking at the slowest speed possible, sniffing dusty lowres pixels, talking to anyone about anything where 90% of the dialogue leads nowhere, and studying the geography, politics, and culture of a made up world. With no clear sense of the end goal and a sluggish UI that makes navigation absolutely tedious, the fun part never started for me.

So I will break this review into two parts. First for buyers then the latter half for the dev. So buyers you can 100 percent this game in under ten hours easily depending your pace and I think the game probably warrants zero to 1 replays. This game is strong with few flaws, awesome ambience and a really unique and cool aesthetic. You truly feel like you are piecing things together slowly. The story is enticing and some of the finest world building I have seen in a minute. Sometimes though you will be wandering around or feeling frustratingly stuck but depending on your personality this could be where the fun comes in. Overall a solid 8/10 experience. Now to the developer this clearly has love put into it and is an amazing game. Couple quick things. One there were numerous typos :downstairs spelled downtairs, wiseass spelled wiseas and a few more I didn't make note of. Secondly you recommend taking physical notes, it would be much appreciated to add an ingame journal feature to write and log notes or even an in game camera to take pictures to help players work through the material themselves. Lastly before the point of no return it would be nice to warn players and create a manual save to return to for later exploration instead of a full game restart. Also manual saving that can be returned to would be nice as well. Beyond that this game definitely at stages shows the limitations of solo work but also the love and charm, for reference I absolutely hate detective games and have never liked any of them but this put me on the genre as a whole. Please keep making games this is phenomenal.