Update Three Hundred and Fifty-Four: 29 November 2019

☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆

Jaffa, thank you SO much for the lovely gift of this game… because it was good! I liked it a lot! Playing it was smooth and easy and fun! I don’t have to be grumpy anymore!

A Case of Distrust puts you in the shoes of a woman named Malone, a female PI in 1924, who is approached by a rumrunner who fears for his life - for good reason. The game is entirely text-based, with a cool, stylized, monotone abstraction of people and places. You talk to people, interrogate them, and explore environments for clues, all to put together whodunit. There’s nothing groundbreaking, no, but this game executes what it sets out to execute very well. Another favorite bit is the vector-rotoscoped portraits that, while aren’t constantly moving like Hotel Dusk</em< portraits, move enough to bring life to each character in a way I was fond of.

The best part about this game, other than I liked the cool feel of how everything unfolds, physically - the way the text unwraps on screen, the transitions to different places, etc - is its characters. You don’t spend a TON of time with each individual ones, and they obviously all fall into their tropes and roles, but there’s enough about them, and their voices are distinctive enough, that interrogating each one and going back and forth to slowly uncover more clues was really fun. Bonus fun tidbits: you have an option every time you travel to talk to your cabbie, and those conversations all reference historical events of that time. It was nice, and there was a surprising amount of them!

While it doesn’t have an entry in the VNDB, to me, A Case of Distrust is functionally no different than something like Ace Attorney… so it’s going on the Visual Novel Masterlist!

It’s such a relief to play a game that’s Just Good. I only have a month left to play new games, so I gotta make it count! Jaffa, thank you SO much again!!

Next up:

See you soon!