DS Review: Touch Detective

The Nintendo DS lends itself perfectly to adventure games; point-and-click adventures are a no-brainer for the touch screen, but surprisingly not enough companies have brought the adventure genre to the dual-screened system. Capcom was kind enough to bring us two installments of the Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney series from Japan, and Nintendo brought us Hotel Dusk a few months ago, and all three games were great. touch Detective from Atlus is the lesser-known of th efour games, but retains many of the same gameplay features that made the others so compelling. Does this game stand up to the high bar for adventure games set by the others? Continue reading our review below to find out.

In Touch Detective, you play as Mackenzie, a young girl aspiring to become a famous detective. Living with your butler Cromwell, you await clients seeking help with different cases. It turns out your friend Penelope is always getting in trouble and will constantly hire your services as an amateur detective. Unfortunately, your ‘best friend’ Chloe is always getting on the way of your investigations, always trying to outperform you. The characters in the game are well developed, each with their unique personality and charisma, and you can quickly become attached to them or begin to dislike them.

Whenever a new case is brought to you, it’s time to investigate. Using the touch screen, you can move Mackenzie around, interrogate possible suspects, question witness or common townspeople, or look around you to find anything suspicious. Sometimes, while talking to other characters, you are given different questions to ask to get more information to help you solve the case. Other times you need to find a certain item somewhere in the game; simply find it, tap it with the stylus, and it will be added to your items list for future use. You can select any item and show it to any character to see if you get a reaction. You could also use an item on another to combine them or change the appearance or performance of one of them. This is the meat of the game; talking to people, asking questions, finding items, and finding clever ways in which to use them. There’s also a Touch List, which includes items that you can’t use but have touched, and records them. You can work your way through the game trying to complete the Touch List, but this is unnecessary and it feels that way. Touch screen controls work well with no problems at all, making investigating intuitive and easy.

However, it doesn’t all work together as nice as it could have. For starters, all four of the game’s cases are too unrealistic, which, depending on your taste, will be either a good or bad thing. It certainly would’ve been nice to have some real-life scenarios to work on. Also, some of the game’s puzzles are ridiculously out of the ordinary. We don’t want to spoil anything, but we can tell you that you will have a hard time trying to figure out what to do next, and the game doesn’t offer any clues to help along the way. You will be forced to talk to people many times, show them every item, and inspect every corner of the environment, which turns out to be repetitive and tedious work at the end.

The game’s dialogue is well written, distinguishing each character well enough and providing some chuckles here and there, but it could’ve been improved; it’s a bit too linear, too straight and to the point. The game’s audio nice; the music goes along with the mood of the game all the time, with some catchy music and good sound effects to go alongside the adventure. Graphically, Touch Detective is nothing impressive, but the semi-kiddy mood of the game is well balanced with the cartoony graphical style and characters.

It’s nice to see more adventure games hit the Nintendo DS and use the system’s features. Unfortunately, Touch Detective could’ve been much better. The game will last you somewhere around 15 hours, with some extra missions that don’t play part of the story. These, however, alongside the Touch List, are features that feel tacked-on and unnecessary. Those looking for a great adventure game should look somewhere else and try Phoenix Wright or Hotel Dusk. If you’re done with those and still need an adventure fix, you will find it here, but it won’t be very satisfying, if the game’s frustrating puzzles and repetitiveness don’t persuade you to stop playing altogether.

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Things we didn’t like:

Final Score: 5.5/10