Nick Bounty and the Dame with the Blue Chewed Shoe

Review

Nick Bounty is a junior detective with big ambitions. Out one day working another mundane case, an opportunity presents itself that he believes will help him to be a fully-fledged detective. Soon a murder manifests, and he dives headfirst into the investigation to prove his worth as an investigator. As the situation heats up, the need for an assistant becomes clear. Interviewing prospective understudies, you will need to choose one that you believe will be the most helpful to your success. With a brand new state-of-the-art crime lab at his disposal, he will be able to collect a lot more data from the clues that are discovered. With an unusual cast of characters to interview as you work your way around the city gathering evidence, a riveting story unfolds as you play.  Are you ready to step into the shoes of Nick Bounty and solve the case of the Dame with the Blue Chewed Shoe.

Released & self-published on March 31, 2020, by the developer Pinhead Games, it is tagged Adventure, Noir, Casual; I have added no additional tags. It features an innovative black and white graphic style in 3D, accompanied by a well-done audio system. Superb voice-acting is done in the traditional noir narration; the characters were matched with their voice actors nicely, and I totally enjoyed every one of them. The evidence-analyzing system is a noteworthy addition and a lot of fun to figure out. With tons of humor packed within, you are sure to be having a laugh-fest as you play. Partial controller support is also included.

Nick’s unusual humor and love of puns had us roaring and going just “WOW” so many times as I played through (my wife watched as I played). It’s full of hilarious one-liners and puns, which, along with its imaginative story, keeps you locked to your seat. I simply loved the way the dynamics in the title are set up for a unique experience in the genre. It is a casual title with pretty straight forward gameplay; I think I only had one area that made me think a lot to figure out how to progress. I want to play through again and see how it affects the game with a different understudy for my investigation. I didn’t see the ending coming until it was almost over.

I did have just a couple of minor issues with the title: pathing would often get stuck on objects in the scenes (if you click an interactable item and do not have a straight path to it, your model will get stuck on items between you and it), and tasking out of the game would default to a lower resolution; we were no longer able to see our inventory, resulting in needing to save and restart the game to change the resolution back to the proper state (there was one time I could not even interact with the escape key to save after I tasked back in, and I lost a couple of levels of gameplay because I had to force close without saving). This did cost a point in my scoring.

Review written by DamageInc. for Zeepond.com!