A recurring thread throughout my backloggd is a love for detective style games, so when a friend informed me of a little indie game that was about solving impossible murders that used miniature dioramas, something I’m also into a bit, I snapped it straight up and got playing on Steam not that long after.
Little Locked Rooms has you join two child protagonists who are given dioramas of crime scenes with impossible murders and disappearances by their father.
The brunt of the game has you looking at important statements for clues, and clicking on objects to get information. You are then given questions such as “where did the culprit go?” or “who was under the mask?” and it’s your task to click on corresponding objects and answer questions correctly.
Items tend to be as they initially seem, there is little in terms of examining and discovery as the game likes you to tackle its cases with logic and reasoning. A potentially smart and interesting choice that sadly falls flat as it either turns into a case of obvious answers or clicking around until you get the right thing.
Unfortunately, Little is how entertained I was by this game. Little is also how much there is on offer here. The Steam page claims 2 - 3 hours and I may be arguing minutes but my full completion runtime is only 1.9 hours and for almost £7, that is not value for money.
It should go without saying that time to cash ratio is not the best way to determine value but something so short needs to be very special or do something incredibly clever to get away with it for me.
Presentation wise you can see where your money is going though, the art is nice, the dioramas, in what little of them exist, are great and everything from the texts to the menus is very clean.
The dialogue, while not something I will remember for years, is well written, the father and children dynamic has its sweet elements and never crossed into too annoying for me, and the mystery explanations or logic made for incorrect choices is quality. The choices could be a lot more blunt with “Right” or “Wrong” than it is and that level of detail in dialogue is quite possibly Little Locked Rooms’ greatest feature.
Unfortunately I found the game's approach to be too linear, being demanded to answer questions in a set order with little analysing, discovery and zero creativity.
The final case being the only one of real length, being an adaptation says a lot to me. The idea for a game was here, what the developers wanted but they didn’t have the skills or perhaps time to write great cases to use within their world.
Once the less than a handful of cases were looked at the lock in the corner on the menus is opened… for nothing. Again, I knew the game was short, but I expected a new set of themes. I had felt throughout playing that I was doing “act 1” and although I did feel short-changed, I also felt relieved I had done it.
It is a shame, because Little Locked Room ticks some boxes for me and is another interesting take on the ever-growing detective-subgenre. The quality is here, and the writing is solid and the trains of thought it follows is well done, just too linear.
In the end, I felt less like a detective and more like I was filling out a questionnaire.
Little Locked Rooms has you join two child protagonists who are given dioramas of crime scenes with impossible murders and disappearances by their father.
The brunt of the game has you looking at important statements for clues, and clicking on objects to get information. You are then given questions such as “where did the culprit go?” or “who was under the mask?” and it’s your task to click on corresponding objects and answer questions correctly.
Items tend to be as they initially seem, there is little in terms of examining and discovery as the game likes you to tackle its cases with logic and reasoning. A potentially smart and interesting choice that sadly falls flat as it either turns into a case of obvious answers or clicking around until you get the right thing.
Unfortunately, Little is how entertained I was by this game. Little is also how much there is on offer here. The Steam page claims 2 - 3 hours and I may be arguing minutes but my full completion runtime is only 1.9 hours and for almost £7, that is not value for money.
It should go without saying that time to cash ratio is not the best way to determine value but something so short needs to be very special or do something incredibly clever to get away with it for me.
Presentation wise you can see where your money is going though, the art is nice, the dioramas, in what little of them exist, are great and everything from the texts to the menus is very clean.
The dialogue, while not something I will remember for years, is well written, the father and children dynamic has its sweet elements and never crossed into too annoying for me, and the mystery explanations or logic made for incorrect choices is quality. The choices could be a lot more blunt with “Right” or “Wrong” than it is and that level of detail in dialogue is quite possibly Little Locked Rooms’ greatest feature.
Unfortunately I found the game's approach to be too linear, being demanded to answer questions in a set order with little analysing, discovery and zero creativity.
The final case being the only one of real length, being an adaptation says a lot to me. The idea for a game was here, what the developers wanted but they didn’t have the skills or perhaps time to write great cases to use within their world.
Once the less than a handful of cases were looked at the lock in the corner on the menus is opened… for nothing. Again, I knew the game was short, but I expected a new set of themes. I had felt throughout playing that I was doing “act 1” and although I did feel short-changed, I also felt relieved I had done it.
It is a shame, because Little Locked Room ticks some boxes for me and is another interesting take on the ever-growing detective-subgenre. The quality is here, and the writing is solid and the trains of thought it follows is well done, just too linear.
In the end, I felt less like a detective and more like I was filling out a questionnaire.
An entertaining, solid and pleasant to look at mystery puzzle game that in its small variety of cases presents us with the task of theorizing what happened in different crime scenarios. It features not only a beautiful presentation with simple assets designed to focus on the object itself but charming sprites and humorous lines of dialogue coming from the main characters. This all plays out as the bossa nova soundtrack creates an ideal atmosphere to come up with different solutions.
And indeed, that's what the game does best: inspiring different ways of thinking out of its players. Instead of simply telling them that something doesn't work without a proper justification it follows the train of thought, poses a series of scenarios that challenge it and in case it could simply acknowledges it but still encourages you to view it from another perspective. This is good and more games should follow this example.
And indeed, that's what the game does best: inspiring different ways of thinking out of its players. Instead of simply telling them that something doesn't work without a proper justification it follows the train of thought, poses a series of scenarios that challenge it and in case it could simply acknowledges it but still encourages you to view it from another perspective. This is good and more games should follow this example.
A short game that has a really interesting central idea but is let down by it's scope and game play decisions.
The game is solving a set of small, locked rooms at 4 locations, a Cabin, a Theatre, a Tower and a Castle, 6 mysteries total. You use the information given, the diagram provided and your logic to crack the case.
The biggest failing Is the way in which the cases are solved, being a series of questions that you need to answer to progress. This causes a bit of a problem when you have solved a aspect of the mystery but the case is lagging a bit behind your reasoning or when you know around about what you need to present but it's not EXACTLY what the game wants. This isn't a problem unique to this game, a lot of other games fall into this pit trap to various degrees of annoyance. It becomes a more noticeable issue when the lack of actual narrative within these locked rooms makes the structure of solving them in a very set in stone order less appealing. Any story the locked rooms have either get explained AFTER solving or are just set dressing for the room to exist at all. The Tower Case felt like its story could of been more baked into the flow of questions but nothing really comes of it.
I think allowing a more natural flow of reasoning would be helpful, maybe instead of a string of questions in a set order, you have a list of the questions you can tackle in any order you want, piece by piece rather than it fluctuating between a solution you've not considered yet or one you figured out a while ago.
I like the presentation of the locked rooms, it's charmingly simple but does convey enough information to allow the cases to work. It's fun watching the crime unravel with these little game pieces.
The three characters, Shelly, Bo and Loup, are extremely basic but work well enough to have banter and conversation in between the case solving, the small attempts at development are cute but far from anything beyond surface. I hope if more games get made, they can expand on these characters more, there's a great dynamic in there.
Biggest disappointment was the last case, which was pretty big compared to the previous ones, a much larger scale with more to keep track of and remember. I was impressed by it even if some of the methods used was somewhat obvious. But my issue came in the fact that only after the case is solved and, in the credits, do you find out that this is based on a short story by John Dickson Carr, a master of locked room mysteries. The significant step up in case quality was very quickly explained and I felt like mentioning beforehand that it's a adaption would of been appreciated. If I did miss anything signposting this was the case, I do apologise.
I overall liked it more than I didn't, but it's something I wish could of been a bit more than it ended up being. I do hope the best for the developers and their future projects, this is clearly a labour of love for the genre and a act of passion.
The game is solving a set of small, locked rooms at 4 locations, a Cabin, a Theatre, a Tower and a Castle, 6 mysteries total. You use the information given, the diagram provided and your logic to crack the case.
The biggest failing Is the way in which the cases are solved, being a series of questions that you need to answer to progress. This causes a bit of a problem when you have solved a aspect of the mystery but the case is lagging a bit behind your reasoning or when you know around about what you need to present but it's not EXACTLY what the game wants. This isn't a problem unique to this game, a lot of other games fall into this pit trap to various degrees of annoyance. It becomes a more noticeable issue when the lack of actual narrative within these locked rooms makes the structure of solving them in a very set in stone order less appealing. Any story the locked rooms have either get explained AFTER solving or are just set dressing for the room to exist at all. The Tower Case felt like its story could of been more baked into the flow of questions but nothing really comes of it.
I think allowing a more natural flow of reasoning would be helpful, maybe instead of a string of questions in a set order, you have a list of the questions you can tackle in any order you want, piece by piece rather than it fluctuating between a solution you've not considered yet or one you figured out a while ago.
I like the presentation of the locked rooms, it's charmingly simple but does convey enough information to allow the cases to work. It's fun watching the crime unravel with these little game pieces.
The three characters, Shelly, Bo and Loup, are extremely basic but work well enough to have banter and conversation in between the case solving, the small attempts at development are cute but far from anything beyond surface. I hope if more games get made, they can expand on these characters more, there's a great dynamic in there.
Biggest disappointment was the last case, which was pretty big compared to the previous ones, a much larger scale with more to keep track of and remember. I was impressed by it even if some of the methods used was somewhat obvious. But my issue came in the fact that only after the case is solved and, in the credits, do you find out that this is based on a short story by John Dickson Carr, a master of locked room mysteries. The significant step up in case quality was very quickly explained and I felt like mentioning beforehand that it's a adaption would of been appreciated. If I did miss anything signposting this was the case, I do apologise.
I overall liked it more than I didn't, but it's something I wish could of been a bit more than it ended up being. I do hope the best for the developers and their future projects, this is clearly a labour of love for the genre and a act of passion.