Mystery games are some of my favourite games to play. I loved The ABC Murders , and I adored The Case of the Golden Idol . I love the sense of discovery, the puzzle-solving, and the satisfaction of watching pieces fall together in a logical order. I even love mystery games when the story is a bit jumbled and the mystery mechanics a bit confusing, like Antioch: Scarlet Bay . The satisfaction from watching pieces fall into place is just too wonderful.

When I say I hated Chicken Holmes, then, you know it has to be bad.

Was him robbed indeed.

Chicken Holmes: The Mystery of Bartolomeu follows the adventures of Digueliro, a chicken detective investigating the disappearance of…

Look, I’ll be honest. This game was poorly translated from Portuguese, to the point that it is often incomprehensible. The grammar is distractingly bad, and the word choice is often an interesting statement on the nature of colloquial language. If you ask me about the story of this game, all I can really say is that there is a disappearance and a nemesis, and a chicken detective has been tasked with investigating. There’s probably a more in-depth story here. I hope there is. If there is, it’s behind a wall of Portuguese.

Kidnappers have a specific angle, after all.

I ordinarily don’t mind poor translations. As long as the meaning comes through, I can usually either understand what’s intended, or be okay with the idea that I don’t have to fully understand everything to derive enjoyment from a game. Antioch: Scarlet Bay is, again, a great example of this, where its translation is hilariously bad, but if anything, that adds to the manic nature of the game.

Chicken Holmes, though, is a game of puzzles, both in clicking on objects in the world, and word puzzles. When the solution to the puzzles is obscured by poor translation, the game ceases to be any fun, and instead just becomes a tedious slog of clicking on items and spaces in the world in the hopes that eventually, something will clarify itself.

I’m not sure which of us has lost the plot more.

This is the second issue with Chicken Holmes. It’s a point and click, but what the items do when clicked isn’t consistent, nor is there any indication in the world that clicking an item multiple times will change anything about its interaction. This creates a world with obscure and opaque rules, none of which seem to be applied with any kind of consistency. Every mystery game requires some degree of opacity for there to be a mystery, but the opacity should be in the story, not in the rules that govern the interaction with that story. By creating a world with no consistent rules for interaction, there is no desire to interact with that world, and thus no real way to solve the mystery except by brute force and absolute frustration.

i don’t understand what you want from me

There are other quibbles I have with the game, all of which give the impression that the creators don’t understand how or have no desire to make a mystery game. A limited inventory size, for example, means the detective has to keep dropping their clues off at a refrigerator with nails in it. However, once the clues have been deposited, they can no longer be interacted with, raising the question of what the point of them was in the first place. There is less of a desire to craft a mystery, and more a set path the game tries to railroad the player down, except the ties have been removed, and the path is obscured by multiple cars claiming each rail junction as their own. This is a broken trainwreck of a game with no redeeming features.

Developer: Dreamlike

Genre: Point And Click, Mystery

Year: 2021

Country: Brazil

Language: English-Ish

Play Time: 1 Hour

Youtube: https://youtu.be/PkRU8eneuSw