Jeez, I go away from newgrounds for a couple months and you make three more of these games? Guess I gotta review them all.
I've already said before that I absolutely love this series, and this one is still no exception. Good characters interacting in a fun point and click that's well designed, uses mechanics that make you think, and it's always a great fun.
*Spoiler warning from here on out*
I think this one is still very strong, and I think the dialogue and characters are actually really good this time around.
Just to get this out of the way, Yeah sewer awk is a bit broken. I actually went and called him before checking the window, and permanently missed out on a clue because I already searched his place afterwards.
You had some impressive callbacks to previous games, Talking dead is a fun character and actually reminded me of sewer awk's phone number was given! I had actually completely forgotten that fact. That and the bodyguards, and just so many good stories that happened in previous games that legitimately made me go back and play them all again.
Last game around I talked about Ghvnn being more of a happy idiot and less of a bodyguard, and even though I do see that really is what he is, I like that his strength is referenced a few times throughout this. I have no idea if you did that intentionally, but I just felt like all the characters were overall stronger this time.
A minor note I want to make is that there wasn't a lot of dialogues outside of strictly what moved the plot forward.
This is only minor, because there is still some fun little add ins, like taunting sewer awk, Margh and Ghvnn talking about locked doors, but it just felt like less fun was had. It's passable though, maybe i'm just thinking of the previous entries too much.
Something that did fall flat for me this time around is my favorite part, the clue system. You have your usual bed of clues that you link together, but the deductions themselves aren't very thought driven.
It's unreasonable to expect every one of these to have conclusions that build off of eachother, but when you're at the end about to point at the culprit, it doesn't feel like you actually figured anything out, just gained the choice of obvious suspects you were thinking of anyways.
I'm sorry if that's not worded very well, but that's how I can best describe the feeling I got.
I did like the cough twist at the end as payoff for when cats told you "Don't trust anyone", but I think there were some missed opportunities there. When the guns were discovered, I immediately thought of bratitat, especially with what "talky" was saying "Half of the city is under his control and the other half is afraid"
That, and maybe the commissioner could have come up as a possible culprit. I honestly thought that would happen, when mum-mum was saying the commissioner was dead wrong.
Difficulty wise.. I actually used the walkthrough, but I swear it's because awk's clue broke and I was very confused. Not the hardest if you just be thorough when inspecting everything, but I was outta touch when I first played it.
What is there is very good, as per usual. happy to see my favorite characters back at it again and played it through twice in one sitting. Not my favorite episode, but still the same good writing and programming you always bring. (Also, a noticeable decrease in bugs! I was very happy about this.)
I'll be reviewing the next two as well, I hope I was helpful!