Crime O’Clock

Genre: Puzzle

Players: 1

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Review:

Crime O’Clock is a “find the hidden object”-style Puzzle game released on PC and Nintendo Switch in 2023. This game shares a lot of similarities with another game I’ve reviewed, Crowded Mysteries, so I’ll be copying over portions of that review here and changing it where it’s pertinent.

In this game, players are presented with a large scrollable isometric-view static perspective of a section of a city, and are tasked with “solving crimes” by finding specific crimes that happened within this part of the city, tracking down the series of events that happened, and then finding the culprit.

These scenes are depicted at first with simple cartoony black and white line drawings, backed by a subdued soundtrack. As you find what you’re looking for in each step of your detective-work, the game slaps a image of a Polaroid photograph over the image with brightly-colored text titling what the image represents.

To track events back in time, the game shows characters who moved at multiple points in the series of events, and often “solving” crimes comes down to finding the person or thing you’re looking for, then trying to spot where they were a few minutes before that, then a few minutes before that. There’s a lot of guesswork involved here, as it’s not always clear what path a character took, and sometimes you’ll have to resort to just looking over the entire area rather than trying to spot the specific path someone took.

However, it’s actually even worse than that – the game often isn’t even clear about what you’re looking for, and there are times you feel like you need to guess or stab in the dark at what you’re supposed to be finding. Of course, you could use the game’s hint system that slowly unlocks hints detailing where you’re meant to be looking, but this often feels like the game withholding pertinent information from the player, only to just give you the answer as you’re trying to figure out what you’re meant to be doing.

This task is made even more difficult by the game’s monochrome visuals, which make it that much harder to spot the specific character you’re looking for among a cityscape full of somewhat similar-looking cartoony characters. Also, I was frustrated when I spotted other crimes that would clearly be pertinent later, but wasn’t given any way to point them out or mark them because the game’s story decided that I hadn’t gotten to that point yet, meaning I would have to “re-discover” it again later.

Also, despite the theme of using time travel to solve mysteries, you aren’t given the freedom to do that yourself, the game’s narrator character swaps over for you when it deems you should be looking at a specific time. This feels like a huge missed opportunity.

Finally, I have to mention that this game’s standard gamepad controls are absolutely terrible, with unintuitive button assignments, and cursor/camera scroll and zoom using the right stick that feels unbelievably sloppy. To the game’s credit, it supports touchscreen controls in handheld mode that are much, much better, but it’s disappointing that players who want to enjoy the game in docked mode will be getting an inferior experience because of the poor control scheme.

In the end, I really liked the idea of Crime O’Clock, but found the execution to be overall pretty bad. It’s delightful to think of a “Where’s Waldo”-style “find the hidden object” game where you’re tracking down crimes, but the way the game does this makes it needlessly difficult to find what you’re looking for, or sometimes even know what you’re looking for. Honestly, if this game’s premise sounds good to you, I suggest playing Crowded Mysteries instead – that game has much the same premise, and while it has its flaws, I think it’s much better-done than what we got here.

tl;dr – Crime O’Clock is a Where’s Waldo-style “find the hidden object” Puzzle Game where players are tracking down events in the timeline of various crimes that happened in a section of a city. This game’s concept is great, but terrible gamepad controls and the poor way this game handles how it conveys information to players makes this one fall flat in its execution. I recommend checking out Crowded Mysteries instead – it has a similar premise, but a much better execution.

Grade: C-

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