Chinatown Detective Agency review: Carmen Sandiego meets cybernoir
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A mystery story is one of the most wonderful, exhilarating experiences in any form of media. Following clues, interrogating suspects, finding the facts, and so on. However, there is a downside. By virtue of their genre, once you reach the end of the story, any attempts to revisit it get diminishing returns. You already know whodunnit. Chinatown Detective Agency (CDA), the recently released indie game from General Interactive Co, attempts to fix that with middling results.
Chinatown Detective Agency is a 2D point-and-click adventure game, intentionally reminiscent of the old-school P&C titles — more specifically, the Carmen Sandiego games. It’s set in a futuristic Singapore and follows the adventures of private eye Amira Darma. Through a series of cases, she gets progressively more involved in the seedy underworld (and oft-seedy overworld) of the city.
Players follow Amira’s various cases, solving them with a combination of in-universe clues and real-world research. She covers everything from murders to thefts to corporate crime — all of which feels equally messy and dirty in this neon-drenched future city. I won’t spoil how the story goes, but there’s a fun combination of cyberpunk and noir in the experience.
CDA has a great lead in Amira, a soft-spoken and direct detective who only lets hints of her past slip every now and then. She’s a new spin on the traditional noir detective, a combination of the scrappy resilience of a Phillip Marlowe and the professionalism of a Johnny Dollar. A dystopia is only as interesting as the common person who has to live there, and Amira’s level-headed way of viewing her world keeps the
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