Confidential Killings makes me realise I probably wouldn’t make a good detective. Not just because I’d probably put my foot through the first clue I come across. But because as soon as my first guess is wrong, it all starts falling apart. Wait, this wasn’t the killer? Time to accuse the waiter, or the victim, or a random pot plant until someone tells me I’m right. Police reports probably don’t get accepted when they’re covered in a thick layer of tipp-ex.
Still, Confidential Killings does a lot to make detective work straightforward. I probably would be a good detective if everyone was happy to reduce key clues down to single words. It’s an appealing gameplay mechanic but one that comes with a sizeable flaw. We’ll get to that, but my lasting impression of Confidential Killings is that it’s a short, snacky game. It’s entertaining, but it whizzes past a bit too quick.
Wordy Gumshoe
Set during the late seventies, Confidential Killings opens with us investigating a car crash. It quickly becomes apparent that there’s more at work than an unfortunate DUI, and we began tugging at a thread. This thread leads us through a story filled with drugs, dirty politicians and an empire built on top of it all. It’s a great central story for a detective game, and each case feeds into the next one. Characters you meet early on keep returning, and you begin to realise just how tied into the underworld everyone really is.
Gameplay-wise, Confidential Killings has you gathering clues and then assembling them into the right order. It’s a standard point’n’click interface. There are a set of rooms and various objects that light up in red. Interacting with them causes our detective to give a description, which you can pick key words (ranging from people’s names to key verbs) out of to act as clues. Once you’ve interacted with enough things, you reconstruct the crime by putting all the words in the right order. It’s a system with a lot of potential, as you theoretically need a good idea of what happened to complete the case. Otherwise it’s just a jumble of words.
Comic Copper
There are a few extra elements throughout, like re-arranging sequences into the right order. It’s an appealing mechanic, but it does have flaws. For one, it’s a bit disconcerting that our detective can’t remember people’s names between cases. We keep having to find them again before we can slot them in. But the biggest flaw is how easy it is to brute force. I didn’t even fully get some of the cases, but solved them just through simple word association. In some cases, just the wording of the reconstruction element guides you into solving things. It’s just a touch too easy.
As a result, cases whizz past very fast. The ending came after about three hours. Still, Confidential Killings is well presented. The art style is straight out of a comic book, with each character being immediately recognisable. It’s great. Writing is generally good too, with a fair amount of extra detail to round out the characters. Still, the characters themselves are fairly flat. They don’t really say much, and most clues we get are from rifling through their pockets. Given that it’s a character driven story, I was hoping for a little more.
Confidential Killings – Pint-Sized Detection
The art style and simplistic point’n’click interface dredged up old memories of flash games from back in the day. If we had to escape a room at some point, then the feeling would be complete. I’m not knocking it for that, mind you. Confidential Killings is as complicated as it needs to be. It’s a short story, with a decent over-arching plot and cases that all bleed into each other. The only real problem with it is that the gameplay is a bit too easy to brute force.
I suppose some part of that blame must be on the player, but when I was solving cases through sentence structure alone? Something’s not right there. Confidential Killings just needs to test the brain more. If they ever make a sequel – which I would be delighted by – then some deeper investigation mechanics would be good. Make us work to get those words. Throw in some red herrings. As it is, while Confidential Killings’ story is nice, the inherent simplicity in the gameplay causes it to whizz by so fast that it struggles to stick in the mind.
