Detective Dolittle

Genre: Graphic Adventure

Players: 1

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Review:

Detective Dolittle is a Graphic Adventure where you play as a man who can speak to animals, and must use that skill, as well as the help of his feisty squirrel buddy, to solve a mystery regarding what happened to the pair’s missing cake.

So right off the bat, it’s pretty clear that they’re going for a Phoenix Wright sorta’ vibe with this game. The comparisons are painfully obvious, even with going line-by-line through a witness’s statement to challenge them with contradicting evidence. The main character even stands with a similar finger-pointing pose.

The game’s artwork, in that case, follows a similarly cartoony style that actually works pretty well for the game, with different animals even making amusingly cartoony expressions in response to the way the conversation is going.

However, while I’m not incapable of enjoying a knockoff, this game absolutely falls flat thanks to having one of the worst localizations I’ve seen on the Nintendo Switch. The English in this game is so thoroughly broken that you can see grammatical errors in just about every other sentence. I can understand a few typos, but to have stuff like “What a mess… many collectible scattered everywhere” (note: they’re talking about food on the floor), “When tried to clean it earlier, the handle was found broken”, and “the ice had melt” all within the first five minutes of playing the game… yeah, this is really bad.

This terrible localization makes the story unenjoyable, and the puzzles awkward to solve, and that’s kinda’ a large part of any graphic adventure. Players can kinda’ muddle through, at times guessing at what the game’s text means, but… why? If you want Phoenix Wright on the Switch, just get Phoenix Wright on the Switch. But even though Detective Dolittle is cheap and has a nice art style, it’s simply not worth bothering with.

tl;dr – Detective Dolittle is a Graphic Adventure game that borrows heavily from the Phoenix Wright games. Unfortunately, even though it has a nice art style and premise, the game’s horrendously bad localization makes it extremely difficult to enjoy.

Grade: D+

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This game has been nominated for one or more of eShopperReviews 2019 Game Awards:

Runner-Up: Laziest Copycat

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