“Inspector Schmidt – A Bavarian Tale” is a detective RPG developed by Active Fungus Studios. I was allowed to play this game and I found my experience to be conflicting, to say the least. I’ll begin with the positives.
The game’s atmosphere is very peaceful and immersive. I enjoyed traversing the landscape and taking in all its sights and sounds. Some of the gameplay mechanics are visually interesting and satisfying to use. I found that the way the game has you finding clues to help you progress in your objective was particularly satisfying. Also, the gameplay loop on paper is interesting. Having your progression rely on the bonds and conversations you have with different characters adds to the immersion of the game and makes the world feel more lived in. The game does a good job of fleshing out random NPC as full-on characters with their own personalities and hobbies. However, my praises end there, as the rest of my experience with this game was pretty negative for the most part.
First off, the game is plagued with visual glitches and inconsistencies. Typically something like this wouldn’t bother me, but they were all so prevalent and consistent that it was distracting. For example, textures would frequently flicker. Some NPC’s animations were extremely glitchy and broke immersion. I also experienced control issues. There was a heavy amount of input lag on multiple commands I attempted during my playthrough. I was always able to do what I wanted to do, but it would occasionally take two or three button presses before the game responded.
Outside of the various technical issues I experienced, there were moments where the general design of the world hindered my enjoyment of the game. This was most notable at night time. The game requires you to use lanterns to see clearly at night. On paper, this mechanic works just fine. However, even with your lantern equipped, it is still way too dark to be able to see clearly. During these segments, I was unsure of where I needed to go to reach my destination and fulfill my objective. The game also lacks any sort of tutorial for its basic mechanics and controls. This was frustrating at times, most notably whenever my stats were upgraded or during mini-games. The game was telling me that I was improving but I didn’t have a clear understanding as to how or what exactly I was improving in.
There are a lot of aspects of this game that I just found to be not very well conveyed to the player. For example, the UI. There were multiple occasions when looking through the game’s menus and looking at the game’s HUD where I was unsure as to what certain things were meant to represent. I also found the camera placement to feel awkward. It almost felt like a large portion of the screen was cut off from my field of view. The gameplay was unfortunately underwhelming. While I like the concept of this game’s gameplay loop, the execution of it falls short and ends up being somewhat dull and awkward. Most of the time your progression is tied to the conversations you have with various NPC’s. But the dialogue is very stilted and unnatural, which makes character interactions not as enjoyable as they should be. The subtitles also don’t match up with the spoken dialogue, which was occasionally confusing and made some objectives unclear.
The game occasionally has you engage in stealth and combat segments. Both of which feel bland and uninteresting; especially in the case of combat. Simplistic stealth can be excused if the core mechanics of combat are engaging, however, I felt that was not the case here. You have one attack button and a dodge button, that’s about it. The impact of your hits feels very light and your attacks come out pretty slow, making for a combat system that overall just isn’t fun to engage with. Perhaps there are upgrades unlocked further down the road that make combat more engaging that I wasn’t able to get to, but as it stands, the basics of combat are pretty lackluster.
Overall, I wanted to like this game. I could see the potential and the vision for what the developers were going for. There are plenty of great ideas in this game. However, poor execution of those ideas and confusing design elements hold this game back for me. I hope the developers can learn from this criticism to improve their craft in their future titles.
