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Babylonian numerals game12/22/2023 ![]() The deck is by no means stacked against Chinatown Detective Agency. Okay, let’s get the good bits out of the way first. I don’t like anything that reminds me of those games, and while Chinatown Detective Agency’s take on it is ultimately pretty inoffensive (the light switch is right next to the door, and the game only does this once) it was a decidedly dire portent for the rest of the six-ish hours that Chinatown Detective Agency took me to finish. This might sound fairly innocuous to you, but thanks to relatively recent experiences with similar puzzles in both Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis and Zak McKraken and the Alien Mindbenders I started to experience the adventure game equivalent of PTSD. However, this initially positive first impression lasted only as long as it took to get to the first location in Amira’s first case, which made me enter a dark room and grope around for the switch to turn the lights on. A few years back I played through Technobabylon (which is another cyberpunk-set adventure game where you play a detective) and had a reasonably decent time with it, and at first glance there’s no real reason why the same shouldn’t be true of Chinatown Detective Agency. Anyway, it’s a sound enough premise for a game, backed up by some pretty good pixel art and animation that, while a little hit and miss in places, do succeed in bringing this future version of Singapore to life in an appropriately cyberpunk-y way. Cyberpunk has obviously been done to death already, and mostly by people with far less imagination than even the developers of Chinatown Detective Agency, but noir wouldn’t be recognisable unless you throw in a few well-worn story tropes. It’s an adventure game that thrusts you into the shoes of Amira Dharma, formerly of the Singapore Police Force and now striking out on her own as a private detective, and I suppose you could say that Chinatown Detective Agency’s addiction to cliché is at least a little fitting since this game is supposed to be mixing cyberpunk with noir. If Chinatown Detective Agency were a film, it would start with a title card that said “SINGAPORE… in the not-too-distant future” because it suffers from a chronic lack of imagination and has to fall back on cliché to make up for it.
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