"Nick Bounty: A Case of the Crabs" was pretty fun back in the day, and it still holds up as well as any typical point and click adventure game, and all that that implies. There's a $1 remaster on Steam if you're interested. But how does the Flash version hold up?
Well, I can't call the game design particularly strong, as it's full of the common pitfalls that these kinds of games are prone to: Multiple moon logic puzzles, cumbersome controls... It's not a particularly smooth experience, at least in the gameplay department. But on the flipside, it also maintains many of the appeals of those games as well. The reasonable logic puzzles, the fleshed-out environmental details, the engaging flavor text, and the amusement of trying to execute terrible ideas, such as trying to talk to dead bodies, shooting every witness you see, or casually admiring your book collection in the middle of a murder scene. Good stuff. So it's a very solid foundation, with the strengths and weaknesses most games of this caliber have. Prototypically point and click.
The story is great. The very beginning loading screen draws you in, and the narration and plot work a deadpan noir detective story humorously and effectively. It's well-paced and well written, with the stakes rising dramatically yet comically. No complaints there.
The style of the game is extremely well done, committing to the black and white color scheme. The backgrounds are very detailed and look great, drawing you in, and the intro storyboards are very engaging as well. The writing in particular is great and is well voice acted to boot. It's especially nice since there's a whole bunch of it to enjoy in the game, from interactions, narrations, and dialogues. The music choice, while small, is also well done and matches the vibe phenomenally. Where the game falters however are the character sprites, which are often jankily drawn or have half-baked animations, taking you out of the rest of the well-illustrated game. The sound also has some strange quirks as well, such as an occasional lack of ambient noise or one section with randomly low-bitrate dialogue. But the details often make up for it, such as hearing blues behind a door in an alleyway, or the relaxing sounds of a dock.
The elements of the game work extremely well in immersing you in the role of a noir setting, justifying puzzle solving by playing a detective solving a murder, but then often you have to make multiple jumps in logic until you're doing trial and error. The crab item especially. And some mechanics are underutilized. While the shoot command's whole purpose is this, being a joke command where you don't have a good reason to use it until the punchline at the end (which fits the game's tone perfectly and is a wonderful little touch), the move command is used literally only once. Because it's useless the entire rest of the game, you'll probably forget about it by the time you need it. I certainly did. There's not even any worthwhile flavor text as a consolation prize. Other odd logic includes needing to use a crab to make a witness speak (What, you couldn't poke him or disturb his bucket in another way?) and having entry to locations being blocked without great reasons why. But then you have lots of little details that pull you in to appreciate the game's sense of humor, such as the aforementioned "Shoot" brick joke, the slew of loquacious and hard-boiled environmental details, and the ability to humor ridiculous action combinations like talk to dead body: "Hey, hey you!" Overall, the sum of its parts, while sometimes are arbitrarily gamey, is strongly cohesive.
All in all, the game is a clever, humorous, pleasantly noirish romp with very enjoyable writing. It was fun, and I enjoyed playing through it, even though it wasn't groundbreaking. But when you're in the moment, it won't matter while you're racking the brains of this Public M. Would recommend.