Not my favorite of the Kemco point and clicks but definitely no slouch. Deja Vu is a meandering adventure through the eyes of an amnesia afflicted detective, seemingly being framed for a crime he didn't commit. You'll use the command menu to pick up items, find codes and keys for locks, and to punch out the occasional assailant to stay alive, all while seeking a cure for your missing memories.

It's deliberately pulpy and dumb, but features a massive number of death sequences (just like its siblings: Shadowgate and Uninvited), making struggling through classic adventure controls a little less taxing than normal.

For adventure fanatics? It's a good time! But for those who don't enjoy the genre, steer clear, because the ways it has aged won't wax positive.

This game really has a choose your own adventure book feel to it, complete with options that will just straight up kill you with no warning. And the save system is really helpful in that you never lose progress if you die, so I just found all the deaths comical.

Despite that, I dont think the game is amazing. The mystery you unravel is not particularly interesting, and it's really easy to miss important things, which makes things tedious. There's some good puzzle stuff in the game though.

It was a bit tedious doing things with the NES controller, having to slowly move the cursor around and also having to awkwardly deal with the cursor movements transitioning between the lists and the cursor areas. I think this would have been a better experience on the old computer versions.

The writing is actually pretty good though-- I mean like, the text in the game. It felt pretty well written and also kinda campy, which is fun. The music and graphics were good too.

Overall I think it's an alright game. A better mystery would have helped this game a lot.

Extremely barebones and anticlimatically short, it could have used the Deja Vus to paint a more interesting main character. Portopia Serial Murder Case on the Famicom released two years earlier than this game's PC versions is a more unfair gameplay-wise but the mystery can catch you off guard with an element of emotional drama for example. Oh well, at least it's amusing to see what happens when you pull the gun on anyone.

I think I would have appreciated this game more if it didn't feel like a generic film noir