The Casebook of Arkady Smith

Genre: Open-World Graphic Adventure

Players: 1

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Review:

The Casebook of Arkady Smith (from here on just referred to as Arkady Smith) is an Open-World Graphic Adventure where players take the role of a detective in a cyberpunk-esque futuristic city. This game was released on multiple platforms in 2020, including Nintendo Switch.

The presentation of Arkady Smith is an odd mix of very good and amateurishly bad. On the good side of things, some decent effort went into creating this game’s cityscape, as well as the occasional indoor areas you’ll explore. The game oozes a neon-soaked atmosphere and this is helped by some decent lighting and reflection effects. What’s more, the Blade Runner-esque soundtrack fits the game’s themes perfectly, and really helps to push that atmosphere.

On the other hand, you have some pretty generic-looking low-poly characters, a complete lack of spoken dialogue beyond the screams of pedestrians if you drive too close with your car, the strange sounds throughout the game like the weird whine of your car’s engine, and while the city has a nice aesthetic, it also looks extremely repetitive, and you’d be hard-pressed to identify which part of the city you’re in just by looking at it.

What’s more, while the game has lofty goals to deliver a cyberpunk whodunnit game, the quality of the writing here is simply not up to the task. It doesn’t help that dialogue trees are completely static – characters have no memory of conversation that’s already passed. In one case, a barkeep found a murdered man in her bar, and every time I had to ask her a new question, she repeated her line asking me what I wanted to drink and needed to be reminded that I was a detective there to investigate a murder. This happens with every character – the murdered man’s friend was shocked when he found out about his friend’s death, and was equally shocked when I broke the bad news a second time so I could ask a second question… and the third…

There is so much about this game that feels like it was created by someone with no experience designing videogames. The Open World, for example… what purpose does it serve? There’s not really anything interesting to do in it, save for devour time getting from one place to another. In a game like the Mafia series or L.A. Noire, this helped with world-building, giving you a real feel for the layout of the city you’re in, but here it’s all just one long stretch of repetitive city, wasting your time.

It’s also a paper-thin veneer, and all it takes to make this plain is getting out of your vehicle and shooting up pedestrians to reveal this. Not only will your gun never run out of ammo, but you’ll never get arrested for your shooting spree. At most, police droids will come to collect the bodies you leave, but feel free to shoot them up too – I guess in the future detectives have a license to kill with impunity.

However, the amateurish nature of this game is present even in its basic elements, such as the way that selecting a point on your map unceremoniously ejects you from the map screen, making you wonder if you accidentally just turned it off rather than making a selection, or the way that at the game’s onset players are given absolutely no direction as to how to proceed with the game’s plot… in fact, they’re given no introduction to the game’s plot at all. I had to actually look up online just where the heck I was supposed to go because the game didn’t bother to inform me how to even get my first case.

I have to wonder what’s going on with the few things Arkady Smith gets right, because on the whole this feels like an amateur’s attempt at game design, and one that’s riddled with problems. Perhaps whoever was in charge of graphics was really passionate about lighting and reflections? Perhaps the person in charge of music doesn’t realize they didn’t need to put in so much effort? Or perhaps, as I suspect, these quality elements come from purchased assets, and the only creative effort this game’s designers are truly responsible for is a ramshackle game with some truly terrible problems that doesn’t seem to understand basic principles of game design. Whatever’s going on here though, I highly recommend you stay away from it.

tl;dr – The Casebook of Arkady Smith is an Open-World Graphic Adventure that has you playing a detective in a futuristic cyberpunk city. Unfortunately, while some of the visuals and music here is surprisingly decent and atmospheric, this game is extremely poorly designed in countless ways, and even things as simple as menu navigation, conversation trees, and signposting are horribly botched. Do not buy this game.

Grade: D

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