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.