Chinatown Detective Agency Is the Carmen Sandiego Reimagining I Always Wanted

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Disclosure: Humble Bundle, the publisher of Chinatown Detective Agency, is owned by Ziff Davis, the parent company of IGN. Humble Bundle and IGN operate completely independently, and no special consideration is given to Humble Bundle announcements or promotions for coverage.

Before I ever owned a game console or settled into the identity of being a gamer, I was still playing games. Specifically, educational games on a clunky Packard Bell like Reader Rabbit, Cluefinders, and one of my favorites, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?

This was before our household had internet, or even before internet game guides were a thing. So when an in-game witness told me, a nine-year-old child, “He asked if I wanted to come along, because he had reservations for two in Kisumu,” my options were limited to staring at a giant globe we had on the nearby mantlepiece, thumbing through a dictionary or encyclopedia, or running to my mom to ask if she knew what it meant (a hit or miss strategy, depending on the clue). I always got a thrill out of this kind of sleuthing, and a lot of my earliest geography lessons came from trying to puzzle out where one of V.I.L.E.’s worst villains had run off to after swiping entire landmarks off the map.

When I opened Chinatown Detective Agency for the first time last week, I didn’t expect to be transported back to the old Packard Bell and globe deductions almost 30 years later, but there I was. Set in Singapore in 2037, its story follows private investigator Amira Darma as she investigates a series of mysteries both within the city and abroad. Each case leaves a trail of clues to follow, but many of them require additional sleuthing outside of the game and are designed specifically to be researched online.