Detective Instinct: Farewell, My Beloved Review
“This is what I’ve trained for” Written by: Hunter (@ReaperHunter23)
I came across a trailer for Detective Instinct: Farewell, My Beloved sometime near the start of the year. It presented itself as a narrative mystery game, seemingly inspired by Ace Attorney, Famicom Detective Club, and the like.The art style and music were both pretty gripping and I rather enjoy narrative mystery games, so I followed all of the links in the description of the trailer to stay apprised of the game’s development. I went through most of the year not really expecting to see the game again for a while. I was pleasantly surprised when I saw another trailer in the fall confirming the game’s release for late November. Well here I am on the other side of playing the game, so let’s see what this mystery has to offer.
Image Credit: Armonica LLC
The story of Detective Instinct starts off with an interesting enough hook. You play as a college student during the last days of a study trip abroad. The opening half hour of the game presents a murder at the hotel you were staying at only to shuffle you onto a train back home the next day. The lingering questions from the previous night don’t have much time to settle before the true mystery of the game begins to unfold. Emma, your character’s friend and classmate, meets a woman once you board the train. After having tea with her new friend, Emma cannot find hide nor hair of the mysterious woman just a few hours later. The more alarming thing is that no one seems to have seen this woman. Even people that were in the same train car as Emma at the time of their interaction.
From there the game introduces you to a colorful cast of train passengers all while giving you a solid breadcrumb trail to string you along the missing person mystery. I think they do a great job of peppering in other points of curiosity and intrigue through a combination of the more shady cast members as well the history of the fictional country this story is happening in.
A game like Detective Instinct will live and die by its writing. Thankfully, the writing in this game is pretty good. The broader mystery has some solid twists and turns but is pretty easy to wrap your head around as long as you pay attention. The real strength of the game’s writing is in the moment to moment interaction. Every scene had me compelled to move on to find the next piece of the puzzle, but also to see what silly interaction would happen to me next.
The rapport between your player character and Emma is really solid. They play off of each other nicely and the player character pulls off being an everyman type of character without seeming like a complete dweeb. Emma is essentially the true main character of the game. The mystery revolves around the woman she met and she’s the one who is always moving things along.
The rest of the cast is a lot of what you would expect for a mystery story happening on a train. You’ve got the shady bartender, the uppity socialite couple, and a pair of loud golfing enthusiasts. All of these characters come at you with so much gusto that they are really memorable. The bartender giving a sly smirk at the glass he is polishing while he just casually lies to you had me accusing him of crimes I wasn’t even sure had happened yet. Interacting with Veda and Monty had me chuckling at how often Veda would flip the switch from migraine victim to ultra-aggressive throat puncher. The golfing duo being so into their sport was already amusing, but it became even funnier when they just started spitting out duck feathers insane conspiracy theories. They all have more to them than what’s on the surface and they are presented with so much gusto that it is hard not to like every character in the game.
Image Credit: Armonica LLC
The gameplay of Detective Instinct was very complimentary to its writing and story. All of the things you can do are listed on the menu off to the side. The two options that will lead to moving the story forward are usually either Talk or Check. Talk lets you chat with any other character in the area. And Check lets you click around on anything that catches your attention. Naturally there is plenty of flavor text to find if you explore every dialogue option and start checking things like a madman.
There’s a number of other options that double as both more flavor text as well as a solid hint system. Any time you feel like you may have exhausted all of your options, it is a good idea to hit the Discuss button. This will have your character exchange a few lines with Emma about what they learned and what they should do next. It’s a good way to present more of the nice rapport between the two leads while also nudging you in the right direction if you need it. This was actually pretty helpful to me early on. Early in the game, I would pretty often select a dialogue option and then keep going down the list. Checking the same option to see if the characters would expound the topic in question is something that just didn’t occur to me early on so I am pretty grateful for this feature.
Detective Instinct is full of a number of quality of life features that remove some of the more minor irritants present in older games in the genre. One thing that immediately springs to mind is that you can only travel to spots that are relevant to what you are doing at the time. This cuts down on the number of times you’ll be flipping from screen to screen hoping to find the bit of progression that you haven’t triggered yet. If there is nothing for you in the Lounge Car, the game just simply doesn’t let you go there until it becomes relevant.
Another feature I appreciated was that the game would oftentimes highlight the dialog options that were new or relevant to pushing the story forward. This is a nice move because while it still lets you select any other options present, letting you know what is flavor text and what is actively relevant to the story better lets the player adjust how they want to engage with the game. You won’t accidently skip over something important if you know that the particular thing you are discussing is there to color in the page rather than be plot relevant.
The notes feature that this game has is really robust. It’s great for the world building of the game and just as an investigative tool. Reading through some of the notes added to the notepad led to me learning some information before a character onscreen actually said it outright. I’m never really in danger of losing my place in games like this because I keep a note document of my own, but this feature is great for a majority of players that I am sure don’t keep their own notes because they aren’t neurotic and silly.
Image Credit: Armonica LLC
There’s a very warm kind of feeling to the way the Detective Instinct presents itself. The artstyle, especially the environments, really meshes with the music effectively. I don’t know, the whole atmosphere gives me a feeling that’s evocative of a really cold day in the winter, but you’re sitting next to the heater while you read a book.
To talk about things a little less abstract, I really enjoyed the game’s art style. The pixel art is really well done, and the other illustration styles that the game occasionally shows you are super effective at adding more gravitas to a situation. The character designs in the game are all pretty effective. . Everyone conveys who they are and what they are about before you ever read a line of dialogue from them. The way the Bartender vacantly polishes his glass while he talks to you conveys a level of distrust. This is only magnified when he pulls out his creepy smiling sprite. The golfing duo have designs that are very complimentary to each other. They both feel like displaced unlockable characters in the original N64 Mario golf game. Veda and Monty are both well illustrated. Monty’s portrait could be the reference photo for the word tired in the dictionary. And Veda gets amusingly hammy with some of her expressions. The one where she’s glaring at the player character conveys her entire personality in one shot. The sprite where she flips her lid and is ready to take a swing at us is also really good.
The music in this game is probably the other shining star along with the writing. There are so many pieces that really set the mood in impeccable fashion. There are a few standout tracks.The first being the crime scene theme. It's a very jazzy, finger snapping kind of tune that is hilariously incongruent to looking at the scene of a murder. The thing that makes it work is that it very much matches up when you take into account the absurdity of the situation. A carefree Detective just let two college students peruse a crime scene. If that’s not jazzy I don’t know what is.
Speaking of the detective, his theme song is another standout tune to me. It starts off with a pretty simple rhythm bit that underscores the whole track and then a string part comes in almost as if to convey that Daltrey is a bit of a weirdo with some rather out of the box methods. That’s just one example, other specific character themes act as the icing on the cake that the writing provides. The Bartender’s theme is probably my favorite.
Image Credit: Armonica LLC
Summary
I’d really like to see what the developer; Armonica comes up with next. Because Detective Instinct: Farewell, My Beloved was a really solid first project and is an easy recommendation if you like narrative mystery games. It tells a simple but tight and well executed story. The gameplay served as a great vehicle to move me from scene to scene. And the moment to moment writing was well done enough to keep me interested the whole way through. Add in a great atmosphere and a solid cast of charming characters and that’s all I could really ask for from a game like this.