The Wild Case

Nice little P&C game to pass 2-3 hours with. Nice drawings and atmosphere, decent story in a rural russian village, okay animations for this genre. There aren't really any puzzles here to solve tho, you just have to use common knowledge and basic logic to progress, like put X and Y together, oil the rusted lock etc.

Bom jogo, point n click curto, mas bem legal

A casual 2D adventure game with a pretty art style but basic story and gameplay. I got this during the Steam Detective Fest thinking it was a mystery-solving game, and there is a mystery in the story but you don't do any detective work in the gameplay. The thing that attracted me was the art, and it is a very beautiful game with a combination of static 2D environments along with minor animations to bring the illustrations to life. The reason I'm giving this a positive review is for that alone, as I enjoyed looking at the illustrations. This is an easy game where you just keep running into roadblocks to getting to the next step where you then need to find and use an item to get past it, so it can feel like constant "what will I need next?" instead of progressing in the game. It's also easy to 100% achievements on if that's your thing (just make sure to ask everyone but the old man about the math puzzle before asking him so you pop the achievement asking everyone about it; it'll take an extra ~10 minutes after you beat the game to get back there if you miss it). The Positives -The greatest strength is in the illustrations and animations. It's a very cute game, and that's why I bought it and played it the whole way through. The animals, environments, and actions in the game are all pretty and fun to look at. -There is a nice little mystery that you do end up solving, and I did find that it was nice to discover what happened. Kind of reminiscent of The Hound of Baskervilles. -The puzzles were intuitive—you either got an item that had a direct use or needed to talk to someone with an item that gave you a new dialog option. -The controls were great. I know it's a simple game, but it's so easy to mess up controls and ruin an otherwise good game. You could use a controller, it let you cycle through all of the clickable things on the screen, and moving from scene to scene is very fast (perfect when you have to click through 6 screens to get from where you find an item to where you use it). There's also a map that is beautifully drawn and can fast-travel you, though I never remembered to use it and treated the game kind of like the old 2D point-and-click adventures like Shadowgate. The Negatives -The story, dialog, and plot are bare bones. Not much you do in the game is relevant to the reason for the game (the mystery) at all. It's just a bunch of fetch quests to help you get from where your train stopped to where you discover the mystery. It would've been better if there were hints along the way or something that would make these quests relevant to your mission and give you some new information (like how Resident Evil and similar games pepper in lore and story throughout gameplay). The worst part is the dialog, which is very basic and short, making it feel like: "I'm trying to get to X." "I need this belt." "Okay, I'll find it." "I need a belt." "I need this mouse caught." "Okay, I'll help." Rinse and repeat. -It is very easy to complete the tasks throughout the game. Most are find-item and then you find the item just looking around normally, with the rare exception of where you need to talk to someone while possessing the item. So, if you're looking for challenge or mystery (beyond the main story, which you only really get information on at the beginning and end), you won't find it here. -There are a couple of control/UX hiccups. I found it mildly annoying that there's a zoom feature for some elements on the screen, and when you use the item you need zoomed-out, it doesn't work...but then it works if you zoom in and do the same thing. They should've made it so that if you clicked the right item on the right area only zoomed out that it would automatically zoom in and use it properly. That's a quality-of-life feature because, worst-case scenario (though this never happened to me personally), someone would think they were wrong and leave the area instead of realizing they just need to zoom in first. Similarly, you'll get surprised in a couple of new fetch quests in the sense that you're at the last thing you can interact with, you'll get a quest to do something new, and so you have no idea where to go—only to find when you backtrack that a new person will appear out of nowhere for no reason. So, things like that were not dealbreakers but were annoying. Once you know about them, you can just work around them. Overall, it's a very basic game and so it might be for kids or for people who love point-and-click adventures, but I'd recommend it for someone who is relatively new to gaming vs. someone who's been playing for a long time. It's a good kind of game to get used to playing with a keyboard and mouse or controller, good for someone who doesn't read (English) very well (because all of the sentences are short and simple), or good for someone who likes little mysteries (it's only a couple of hours long gameplay-wise). Oh, and anyone who likes the art style, as I enjoyed every new scene and was impressed by their pretty illustrations. But I wouldn't recommend it to really anyone else, as even at 2 hours you might find it too simple for you to enjoy and might get sucked out of the game while playing a bunch of irrelevant-to-the-story fetch quests and not really getting to unravel the mystery yourself. I'm giving the game the benefit of the doubt that this might be a small/new developer that likes these little indie adventure games and is gaining experience in game design. Depending on their experience and skill level, this is either a good start for someone new to development with amazing illustrations for a small team or too basic of dialog, story, and plot for a more experienced game developer. But I enjoyed the illustrations and the finding out what happened at the end, so I think that players who like little mysteries might enjoy it. I would suggest getting it on sale, though, if you are someone who believes that price should be correlated to time spent and the production value. The strength is in the art style, so if that isn't as important to you than gameplay and story, I wouldn't suggest you try it.