Jose Zagal's Home Page - Games & Game Studies

Home	Talks and Slides	My GameLog	Research and Projects	Publications	Resume	Teaching
Back // GameBreadth Project // Game Ontology Project // GameLog

Crime Lab: Body of Evidence (DS) Status: Finished playing I started playing this game on Sunday 4 April, 2021 // I stopped playing this game on: Saturday 10 April, 2021
Current opinion of this game
No comment, yet.
April 10, 2021 01:23:34 PM
Finished it! (with a little help from the game...) I'm really surprised by the diversity of puzzles and puzzle activities, in fact once I finished the game you can engage with lots of them as stand-alone puzzles (with 10 levels each!). So, there is definitely "value" here. The variety of puzzles goes beyond simple variation of "manipulate this to do x" with some of them nicely woven into the game's narrative. For example, I had to tap on some tiles - until I found one that rang hollow! (stuff was hidden behind!), I also had to "scan" my face (from the DS camera) and other things like that. The camera-based puzzles were actually quite wonky. (I spent coins to clear one despite it being a trivial one where all I had to do was place the stylus on a thumbpad on the screen. I don't know if it was that I was playing at night (less light) or that I was on my DSi XL (perhaps camera placement messed up stuff the devs expected?) - but the camera puzzles were definitely the least interesting ones in that they didn't really work. As for the story? Lots of twists and turns and bla bla bla. Nothing too memorable (for me) but I wonder if there's an earlier game? Was this part of a series? I say that mostly because there's lots that seems implied about the main character....
April 6, 2021 11:58:43 PM
I was fully expecting this to be a "hidden object" game with a mystery theme - or police procedural theme? Sort of like the James Patterson's Murder Club(?) game I played earlier this year. It definitely started out along those lines - with a request to find a bunch (easily found) objects in an area. Oh, but things changed rapidly after that! The game is a bona fide adventure game - find objects, use them on places/things in the environment and solve puzzles. And, so far - half way into the game, the puzzles are actually quite complicated! I had to get paper and pencil to solve a few of them in fact. I'm not sure I'll be able to handle them all because they've been getting quite...uh...obscure. Also, there have been a few puzzles/mini-games that have used the DS cameras! (the game's case indicates "additional DSi features" which is nice) The minigames didn't work too well - in one I had to "swipe" a mirror by waving in front of the camera (it's a nice visual effect, but it didn't register my hand that well) while in the second I (think) I had to rotate the DS (spin in place) to turn a lever. This second one sort of worked. It was wonky enough that perhaps I was doing it wrong? I'm not sure what the camera was picking up or reacting to but I was able to solve the mini-game after a bit. The game has both a hint system as well as a "bypass a puzzle" system. The former only works "in the world" and it points you to a the thing you need to use (and where) to make progress - that's when it works. Othertimes it just gives you a hint that's hard to make sense of (especially, I think, when you need to change locations to make progress - which is sometimes hard to tell). The bypass sytem triggers when you've failed a puzzle a few times in a row - you spend 5,000 pts and done. It doesn't actually tell you the solution, it just bypasses the puzzle. It's a nice feature though I wish you could use it from the get go, rather than having to fail a few times. I say this mostly because some puzzles have a long timer on them so it can be a drag to wait it out (especially if you've realized that you have no clue at all what to do). I'm not sure how much longer I'll continue playing - it's not been too long, but as the difficulty ramps up (and it has!) I'm not sure I'll be able to keep up the (relatively) speedy pace. Oh, another interesting thing - and I note this because the last detective solving crimes game I played on the DS also had this - the protagonist is a woman!

Crime Lab: Body of Evidence (DS)