Alone in the crowd

Review

You wake up in a locked room with no idea why you are there. Several seconds fly by, and you realise you don't know who you are. As sweat starts pouring from your face and the entire surface of your body, your mind spins into a panic.  Then a strange voice breaks out of nowhere. The voice seems friendly and reassuring, and it seems to know you. It introduces itself as Boxy, the AI that will give you tasks, show you how the multiple gadgets work, and answer all your questions. Get ready, as you have some investigation to do in Alone in the Crowd. 

Alone in the Crowd is a puzzle investigation game developed and self-published by Machine Nun on the Steam platform on February 27, 2024.

This review might be a bit strange because I am not sure how far I have managed to go, and the reason for that is that there is a fair bit of learning in this game. After waking up and becoming acquainted with Boxy, the AI, the room you will work in is pretty much empty. The room itself is displayed as a rectangle that extends right across the bottom of your screen. It's probably one-fifth of your entire screen. The rest of the space will be filled by the gadgets you'll open to find individuals and fulfil your tasks. You can only have two gadgets open at the same time, and as you progress through the game, you'll need to swap between several gadgets to complete a task. This is not an easy game to play in terms of puzzles, but the developers have created an extremely helpful data box where you can go for any information relating to the gadgets.

Boxy will appear as a monitor suspended from the ceiling; clicking on it will make it more prominent and fill one of the two gadget spots. Boxy provides some humour in this game and will reward you by answering a question each time you complete a task, enlightening you about the story. But most of the time, Boxy's responses are pretty vague.  As you get used to a specific gadget, a new one will be given to you until you have eleven gadgets in your room. One of them, the merger, can be used in ten different ways.

I am quite amazed by the depth of this game. Some of the tasks so far have been quite difficult. For one, I had to find a person who had visited a gymnasium for a good workout and also visited a lounge for relaxation on the same day.  Then I had to provide a photo from the surveillance system where the person is not wearing a hat or glasses. To give you an idea, when I matched all the criteria in the wheel report, thirty-nine matches came through. It took me some time to figure out as I had to swap between six different gadgets to complete the task.

The graphics are good, and the game runs well. I didn’t encounter any crashes throughout my gameplay, which is always a positive. I enjoyed playing Alone in the Crowd, but it is a challenging game and takes quite some time to complete tasks.

Review written by THE CPT FROGGY for Zeepond.com

 Alone in the crowd Steam Store Page