In a seemingly unconnected intro sequence, John (that's you that is) wakes up in a dingy hospital.
You are then thrust into the shoes of detective John Morley in a gritty, noirish atmosphere. After spending several months in the hospital recovering from injuries sustained during his last case, Morley returns to his office, only to find that his secretary has left due to a lack of income.
While feeling deserted and generally sorry for himself, a mysterious woman appears in the office, Lady Margaret Fordside, who (with the voice of a much younger woman for some reason) tasks John with solving murder of her daughter Elody that occurred some 20 years ago. The police had closed the case but Lady Margaret is convinced that the real killer remains at large, and offers John a huge sum to investigate and hopefully get answers to the questions surrounding her daughter's death.
Starting out as a gentle murder mystery detective "walking game" first-person puzzler, the game becomes a haunting investigation into forgotten places and long-hidden truths about the Fordside family, their dingy Blomsbury Manor house, their staff and acquaintances...
Discovering that Lady Margaret had committed Elody to a sanitorium, you begin to understand the family's problems. Your first suspect is Walter Brandon, Elody's "gentleman friend" who she met at the nuthouse–always a good place to meet a new boyfriend.
Gameplay boils down to plodding around (although you can "run") looking for something that either a) you haven't examined or b) has a green glow to it. After a while even this tenuous clue system vanishes so... more plodding around. You'll be reading a truckload of text (most of which is irrelevant to the case) and trying many, many locked or padlocked doors, which you have to plod around and find the keys or combinations to. Yawn.
One of the first things you'll notice is the terrible lipsync - which is a shame as most of the voice acting and music are good. Maybe it was done in the dev's native Spanish but if you're going to sell to an English-speaking market with what is obviously an English main character, at least get the lipsync right. We'll blame it on the 'Localisation' team and leave it there. As for the visuals, I had to turn the brightness setting way up, or some areas/things were so dark that I couldn't even see what they were–Elody's paintings in particular. In retrospect, maybe that wasn't such a bad thing after all.
The twisting plot slowly unfolds (although not that slowly as the game can be finished in a couple of hours). It tries and fails for a few jump scares but has some clever psychological ideas, while also having a few plot holes–particularly in the timeline... Like blood stains still present outdoors after 20 years, electricity & phone still on in a sanitorium that had closed down years previously?
While far from ugly, the game looks like a 15 year-old PC point & click game, not a game developed for the 25/26 console market. Visually it's hugely mixed, with some good-looking scenery that has some decent detail, but also has horrendous gaps in it, as well as plenty of clipping and disappearing objects.
The gameplay also suffers from illogical storage of objects, like not keeping a piece of paper with what obviously has a combination on it, while pointlessly keeping notes about Elody's stay at a sanitorium.
There's also a distinct lack of care regarding the in-game text, with things like Elody spelt Elodie and/or Elory, and Margaret spelt Magarette, Sherdinand spelt Sherdinant or Sherdenant, Blomsbury spelt Bloomsbury in text and subtitles–spelling might not matter to Jandusoft, and it's the sort of detail that matters little, but grates on this reviewer's nerves.
For a price of £9.66 you pretty much get what you pay for, 2-4 hours of wandering around looking for a way to progress. A general lack of polish means that I'm rather glad this is John’s final case.
Thanks to Jandusoft & Indigo Studios