[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

Seems to me a great potential has been wasted with the game engine used. I mean, if there is an emergency, it shouldn't take 2 seconds for a character to simply turn back and align with the object that has been chosen for interaction. It's so "10 years ago". I like the way how the story is told, then again, the game engine tells that story so slow that your excitement is questionable. Still, yes, I recommend the game as it is hard to find a solid adventure game.

I'm not a big fan of point and click adventure games, I usually find them usually too boring or with excessively contrived puzzles. However, seeing the trailer for this one got me to play the demo on steam. Quite frankly, the demo blew my mind, I couldn't wait to play the rest. After buying all 4 episodes and having just finished the first, and it's everything I hoped for, and more. In short: try the demo on steam and know that the game builds and expands on that, especially on the "puzzler" side. You play as Erica Reed, FBI detective in this puzzle, murder investigation thriller, point and click adventure game. The game has very immersive atmosphere supported by nice art and beautiful music, ranging appropriately from relaxed and melancholic to foreboding and tense. Additionally, the voice acting is superb across the board, giving life to the characters and supporting a very good story, gripping and often emotional as well. While you're putting your puzzles together, you're not just figuring out gimmicky, weird puzzle mechanics, you're actually using clues and information you uncover on your investigations in a quite logical manner. Furthermore, and not to spoil anything, Erica's special "intuition" talent is cool tool for finding clues that is very well realized and interesting to watch. So, you'll actually feel that you're unravelling the mysteries and learning more and more about the story. Making progress provided me with a lot of "oh!" moments, when I felt that rush after you just realized something new that happened in the story, and made me feel gripped by it. There are very good scenes to be had, especially one close to the end, where the voice acting, the writing, the art and the music all came together in a magical, memorable way. There's even some tense "action puzzle" scenes, which were very interesting as well, I wasn't expecting to be so engaged and tense by a point and click puzzler. I only stumbled very occasionally on a puzzle here and there, and I found out that it was my fault in missing some info or other. If you're stuck, you can text your dad, a former police investigator, and he will give you hints on things you've missed that point you in the right direction without giving it away. A very cool system, I thought, hitting the balance between preventing real frustration while making you "do the work" without straight giving you the solution. With all this, I found the puzzles overall to be interesting, logical instead of randomly contrived and virtually non-frustrating. There's only a few cons to these game, in my opinion. There are occasional bugs involving the characters' placement and movement on the screen, but they "fix themselves" straight away without disturbing the game. The other "problem" is that the game is sometimes a little slow, not only the overall pacing of the story but (and more importantly, I think), while you're clicking and waiting for the characters to do their animations. Still, one can argue that the slowish pacing enhances the immersion and enjoyment of the game by exposing you more to the very good atmosphere overall. It's not often that a game surprises me so. If you are ready to put some quiet time aside for this, you'll be rewarded with a good mystery story, with some sparks of beauty, that will make you feel the more engaged the more you progress through the puzzles, and even has some interesting and tense "action puzzles". Again, you can't go wrong in trying the demo for yourself.