Review: CHINATOWN DETECTIVE AGENCY Evokes Classic Edutainment Titles in a Fun Package
Chinatown Detective Agency had me intrigued when I first saw the trailer. Then, it released earlier this month and Humble Games was kind enough o provide me with a copy to review it on PC. The game was developed by General Interactive Co. and published by Humble Games and WhisperGames and released on PC, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox One. In the game, you play as the ex-cop turned P.I. Amira Darma in a playstyle reminiscent of the old Carmen Sandiego games. All the thoughts that follow are my own.
If you have fond memories of playing games like Carmen Sandiego’s Great Chase Through Time, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, etc., then Chinatown Detective Agency will definitely have some appeal to you. Throughout the game, you’ll be tasked with figuring things out such as where an artifact’s original home is or what type of wine a character would need to be persuaded to help you. There aren’t a lot of tools in-game to help you with this, and that’s okay. The game is designed to and encourages you to use the internet and other sources if needed. There’s a button in the interface that will open up a web browser so that you can start performing searches to help you. I genuinely really enjoyed this part. It brought back that feeling of edutainment games without feeling like a kid game. That being said, some of the hints your given can be a little obtuse or a little hard to figure out the words you need to search for when presented with an image or description.
The game is presented in an 8-bit art style and it’s divisive for me to say the least. I think the world and environments look great and interesting in the style. However, I personally don’t like the way it translates to people. At first it seems fine, but the more I played, the more I wished there was more detail to the characters. They don’t have to be high resolution, but maybe a step up from where they currently are. As for the game’s sound, it’s been well handled and it’s definitely a positive for the game. The effects sound solid; the voice acting isn’t the best, but it’s decent; the music is fitting; and the mix works well.
The gameplay itself involves a lot of point-and-click and while this works well for the most part, I do wish movement was handled a little differently. Right now you click and Amira goes where you clicked. I wish that for movement I could’ve used my keyboard or even just click-and-held my mouse button. There are instances when you have to “hack” into some device and in order to do that, you just play a matching game that lets you make a lot of mistakes as you click around and I found it hard to fail any of them. It’s kind of nice to have something like this, but it’s not a minigame that I like very much because it is very random and very forgiving. I would’ve preferred a different puzzle like Mastermind.
As you play Chinatown Detective Agency, you’ll be acquainted with how to play and three different clients that you’ll eventually have to choose between to be your main client. One has you returning artifacts to their rightful homes (aka doing a reverse Indiana Jones), one has you bringing down corrupt government officials, and one has you exploring secret organizations. Each has their own appeal and the diversity definitely lends itself to at least three playthroughs. Each one requires different approaches with how you handle things and it’s done well in my opinion.
There are a couple of loose things that I would like to see adjusted. First, there’s a windowed mode and a fullscreen mode of the game, but I wish there was a borderless windowed mode. The windowed mode just looks not great with the borders and fullscreen mode will minimize the game when you open up a browser window to do your research. I think the game could greatly benefit from a borderless window mode. Also, I struggled a lot because the game uses the day/month/year layout for the calendar and since I’m an American I’m used to the month/day/year format which led to a lot of problems and wasted money when buying plane tickets.
Some random positives include character portraits for the more main cast and you can change the font to make it easier to read. I was able to read with the original font, but do appreciate that they acknowledge that for some the font may be hard to get through.
Overall, Chinatown Detective Agency is enjoyable. It’s a fine adult edutainment game that only costs $25 on your preferred platform. It definitely evokes games like Carmen Sandiego effectively even if there are some aspects that I wasn’t the biggest fan of. I think I would give this game a solid 7.5, but we don’t do .5 scores here, so I’ll round it up to an 8!
