Rebirth fails to clear the lofty narrative bar Remake set for itself, settling instead for walking back every interesting piece of setup from the previous game. It fails to accurately represent the characters, reducing most of them to Flanderized shells. It fails to provide an interesting open world, settling for rote checklist work that drags and drags. Aside from the finely tuned combat and inventive music, this game is an utter failure on nearly every imaginable front. At this point, we’re confident in saying we won’t be back for Reunion or whatever the fuck they end up calling it.

A small, independent studio in China took inspiration from some of our favorite mystery games, and spun it into a delightful detective story spread along (you guessed it) the Yangtze River. It’s clever, humorous and educational all at once: we appreciated getting to learn a few factoids about the Chinese legal system in the late 1800s/early 1900s, and how defending yourself could be a real uphill battle.

It stumbles at the end with some puzzles that demand precise ordering of events, and even though they’ve patched this already, the English localization could use more work. Aside from that, we’d recommend this to just about anyone who loves a good detective game.