Year: 2024
Platform: PlayStation 5
Genre: Mystery
Review Date: 2/16/26
Rating: ***

James Karra is a washed-up police detective who's currently suspended due to a recent scandalous disaster. He's also 120 years old and recovering from his fifth body transfer. It's 2329, and immortality can be achieved by transferring your consciousness into a younger body - assuming you're rich enough to afford one. And thus, the groundwork is laid for the inevitable class war of the rich and elite getting to live forever by literally living off of the flesh and blood of the poor. The game opens as James is called in by his corrupt boss to unofficially look into the death of a high ranking politician in New York City. When it looks like murder, he's immediately pulled off the case, but James is driven to uncover the truth. That puts him and his reluctant new partner in danger, along with his own faltering sanity.

It's not so much of a game as it is a walking simulator or interactive cinema. James spends most of his time investigating crime scenes with a handy high-tech gadget called a "reconstructor" that somehow reconstructs the timeline of the scene of a crime. Gee, does everyone on the police force have one of these? If that were so, then there would literally be no unsolved mysteries and people would constantly be altering the past. After manipulating time and gathering enough evidence (seriously, how does that even make sense?), you attempt to put the clues together to form a hypothesis and then move on to the next crime scene.

Unfortunately, using the reconstructor, X-Ray, and ultraviolet light tools is tedious, and the crime scenes are a bit of a slog. You're also presented with way too much information to keep track of, and there's no log or notebook to store your findings. The gameplay mostly boils down to looking for things to click on and following bread crumbs that lead you to the next piece of evidence. Fortunately, the art direction is fantastic and the graphics look great, so the crime scenes are gorgeous, highly detailed, and visually rich to look at.

The evidence boards, on the other hand, are awful. These puzzles are literally impossible. Not only does the game not give you any instructions on how they work or what to do, but they make absolutely no sense at all. And there are too many variables to just try to randomly guess, so I had to look up the solutions for all three of them online. Even knowing the answers, they still don't make sense, so that's a major game design failure.

Another problem with the game is the writing. As a neo-noir cyberpunk thriller, it's marginally interesting, but it doesn't really cover any new ground. Rich and corrupt politicians lying to and betraying the general population simply to maintain their putrid status and nurture the class divide is especially relevant right now, and watching it play out evoked a strong emotional reaction. Unfortunately, the dialog can be a bit pedestrian, and I quickly grew tired of hearing the word "fuck" in every other sentence. Was this written by 15-year olds? James is an asshole and a grouchy old bastard, and his police liaison is a castrating bitch who rarely has anything nice to say. And when you try to be nice, she responds even more caustically. So you've basically got two toxic and unlikable people who are constantly arguing and yelling at each other throughout the entire game, which isn't very pleasant. Some might call this edgy. I call it annoying and abusive. As with any game that offers dialog choices, the choices are always unreasonable, which leads to anxiety and analysis paralysis. Many dialog choices are timed, so you either panic by randomly choosing something or you let the conversation time out and see what happens.

Speaking of analysis paralysis, at several points the game notifies you that you've made a choice that affects the outcome of the game, but there are only two endings and only two critical choices to make. Given how bleak the story is and how broken James is, it's no surprise that both endings are bad. How bad is a philosophical question for the player to ponder.

Presentation-wise, it's a gorgeous game that combines the "Blade Runner" aesthetic with 1950s design sensibilities. It doesn't make any sense, but it's pretty to look at. The somber and melancholy music does a great job of setting the mood like an old detective film. The biggest disappointment is the first person perspective, which I'm not a fan of, but I understand why they went with that approach. The voice acting is a mixed bag. The guy who plays James is decent enough when he's playing it straight, but his inner monologues and narrations are overly cheesy and melodramatic. The sneering "stranger" voice that intrudes halfway through sounds like a ridiculous comic book villain and was a constant distraction. The best acting is from Sara, James's antagonistic partner, who despite being an annoying bitch has her own problems and dirty little secrets.

After playing several Metroidvania games that were so freakin' hard that I had to quit after the first 1-2 boss battles, this was a welcome respite where I didn't have to rely on skill, reflexes, timing, and dexterity. It's far from perfect and the reconstructor gave me bad memories of "Remember Me" (2013), but it kept me entertained for about eight hours. Unfortunately, you can't manually save your game, so the only way to get both endings is to play through the entire game again, which probably isn't worth it. Unless I get hit with a bad case of insomnia.