Touch Detective（おさわり探偵 小沢里奈）

I really wanted to like Osawari Tantei, I really did. The game had me sold from the get-go just with the cute cover art alone. Combined with the fact that I'm already heavily invested in the nameko franchise, I'm probably the most biased customer Success would ever find. However, no matter how much I tried to like this game, it just wasn't very good.

You had me at hello.

First of all, this adventure game doesn't even have a single puzzle. This is more the old-school adventure game where the only puzzle is combining and using things in your inventory except... it doesn't even really do that!

I mean out of the 4 cases included in the game, the first case has some item puzzle solving and the 2nd case gets a bit tougher in terms of figuring out what you need to do as well.

Enjoy solving puzzles while it lasts (spoiler: it doesn't last very long)

But just when you expect case 3 and 4 to bring things up a notch, it's almost like the developers stopped caring because the last two cases consist almost entirely of visiting the same 6 locations OVER AND OVER, talking to various people in order to trigger an event to progress the game.

This game isn't exactly open-world to put it mildly

Another problem is that while the characters are cute in a weird emo way, they are totally one-dimensional. I enjoyed the first and second case but by the time I got to case 3 and 4, it was just kind of more of the same. Combined with what seemed like a total lack of effort in the latter half, the game was quickly wearing out its welcome, which is really bad for a short game that took less than 10 hours to finish. I have to admit though, the fleas in case 4 were pretty damn funny. Definitely the highlight of the game.

There are additional extra puzzles and whatnot you can do besides the tutorial and 4 main cases but at this point, I just don't feel like playing it beyond the game end credits.

In theory, this game should've been totally up my alley, but it really wasn't.
Score: 2 sometimes just being cute isn't enough out of 5 (9 hours to beat)

I really wanted to like this game and I did in the beginning but ultimately, I just ended up hoping that at least the two sequels are much better. If anything, the Nameko franchise that came about from this series seem far more successful for Success (yeah, I had to go there). Nameko has tons of merch, anime, children's books, games, you name it. This is great if you're like in elementary school or have kids. But yeah, as for me, I'll pop in the sequel 2 1/2 in the ol' DS sometime and hope for the best. Or maybe I'll even pick up the nameko 3ds rhythm game. (It's on my wishlist *wink wink*).

Get dat banana stand money!

Scale
0 - Awful
1 - Bad and not worth your time
2 - Has some flaws but still enjoyable
3 - An average enjoyable experience
4 - A great game
5 - Masterpiece of a caliber only found very rarely