Review by: Brandon "Wiggly Worm" Cackowski-Schnell

Is a mystery still a mystery if no one cares about the solution? This philosophical nugget may be the best thing to come out of James Noir’s Hollywood Crimes even if the game’s biggest flaw lies at the crux of the question. The game is a murder mystery that does its best to involve you by taking your picture and plying you for personal details that it leverages later on, but when all is said and done, the story is executed so poorly that you’ll likely stop caring before the murderer is revealed. There are also puzzles but they’re not all that great either.

You’re just a regular person acting our your life’s dream as a contestant on a popular 1960’s puzzle game show when an old friend shows up and asks for your help solving a couple of murders. Some people have been found dead, all clutching one puzzle or another and as you’re on a hot streak in the game show department, the FBI asks for your help. It makes sense at first in a kooky kind of way even if it doesn’t hold up over the long haul. Each solved puzzle leads you to a new clue and a new body until finally the trail goes cold and you go back to doing whatever it is you do until your next game show appearance in two weeks. I don’t know how TV was done in the ‘60s, but two weeks in between game show tapings seems like the wrong way to keep the viewers excited.

During the show tapings, you pick puzzles from the puzzle board in the hopes of beating the high score of your opponent. There’s a score target you have to hit in order to move on to next week, but your real goal is beating the other guy and winning a year long, all-expense paid trip around the world. Puzzles have different point values with higher scoring puzzles requiring more mental effort and every puzzle completed without any hints nets you bonus points. If you’re going to make a game with puzzles at its core, you should probably make sure the puzzles are rock solid, which, in this case, unfortunately isn’t the case. Many puzzle types are repeated throughout the game either with an increase in difficulty or a slightly different coat of paint and too many fall to simply brute forcing your way through them.

Hints are available in the form of fan letters that you receive as you progress through the game show and best your opponent. Unfortunately all of these letters are compiled in one giant list that you have to scroll through from the beginning every time you access them. At the beginning of the game it’s fine, however as you work your way through the 80+ possible fan letters, finding the puzzle you haven’t solved buried in the mid-‘60s becomes a chore. Oddly enough, while using hints in the mystery and game show puzzles brings about a penalty, the puzzles given to obtain further hints can be failed and restarted as many times as necessary to obtain the right answer. Adding to the irritation is the need to include audience reaction every time an answer is submitted—unnecessarily drawing out what should be a simple process of user feedback. Seeing how you read the letters in the comfort of your hotel room, why an audience is there in the first place makes no sense, but seeing how nothing else does in the story, I guess it can be forgiven.

As you make your way through the game, bouncing from game show appearances to murder mystery solving, the story tries to throw twists and turns in your way but they rarely make sense. The simple fact that all of the victims are past contestants on the show you’re currently starring on should make you run away from the murders and never turn back, but no, your friend who you’re apparently not friends with any more would be disappointed if you didn’t help, so help you do. Also, it’s possible you’re crazy, so there’s always that. By the time the game ends and the killer is revealed, it’s hard to be shocked or surprised as it’s all so silly that it prevents you from caring. Ditto for completing your stint on the game show after the criminal mischief is over. The game even tries to end on a mysterious note, leading you to believe that there may be a sequel, but all it does is spur more existential questions about sequels and apathy.

James Noir’s Hollywood Crimes tries to be a throwback to the FMV PC mysteries of decades gone by combined with the puzzle stylings of modern gaming’s Professor Layton series, but ends up being a nonsensical story and a lackluster combination of mundane puzzles. 3D is used to good effect in some puzzles, but the same effect could be had by staring at a lamp and walking around it, furtively searching for hidden messages before finally quitting and seeing if there’s any pie in the house. Maybe just skip the effort and go straight for the pie.