I had intended to have a review up for Detective Kobayashi—an enjoyable detective visual novel with similarities to the Phoenix Wright series—by the time it released earlier today, but I budgeted my time based on the assumption that it’d continue to be a visual novel with investigation elements. Chapter 3 changes up the gameplay in a big way, unfortunately, turning much of the chapter into an insufferable escape room filled with hidden objects and a general lack of clarity, and I simply ran out of time while trying to figure out what it was asking me to do. Detective Kobayashi‘s first two chapters are fantastic and easily recommendable. This third chapter is borderline game-ruining, though, and I’m only pushing through it out of obligation. Normal players who lack such obligations will likely drop the game entirely at this point and never return.

It’s usually not a good sign when the menu has an option to make one specific section’s puzzles easier, and yet that’s the case here. All that option does is give you three hints for where items are or what they can be used for, though, and there are far more than three tricky parts. There’s a key hidden under a corner of the rug that you have no reason to even suspect can be interacted with, for example.

Nothing deserves more ire than the 3D word puzzle. Take a look at this picture of colored blocks. Even if it was obvious that the jumble of nonsense was a word, which it very much isn’t, there’s no way those blocks correspond to the solution S-A-E-K. The E is all screwed up, for one thing. This is what a lot of these puzzles are like, and they stop Detective Kobayashi in its tracks and kill every ounce of fun that preceded chapter 3.

I should also mention that when I installed the game onto my “B” computer (which I started writing this on), the game crashed so hard that it destroyed the computer. The 6870 GPU that’s served me well for several years now displays heavy artifacting. My motherboard (and/or my CPU) is also damaged beyond repair to the point where I can’t even enter Window’s recovery mode without the entire computer locking up. Thanks to Detective Kobayashi, I no longer have a secondary computer. To be honest, it feels like a part of this site’s history has been murdered (most of those components were what I started out with), and not having that second computer means that I can’t get as much done during the course of the day. Needless to say, I’m pretty angry at this game right now.

I might finish a review for it in the next couple of days. I might remain angry at how much hardware was just destroyed and sideline it forever. Either way, there’s no way in hell that I can possibly recommend something that becomes such a flashing trash heap halfway in.

Detective Kobayashi drops the ball in chapter 3’s escape room first appeared on Killa Penguin