As of late, Memories of Fear has really been awesome when it comes to translating games that I've been wanting to see translations of forever. They translated June Bride Nightmare, Purgatory and Friendship (although that one was kinda crap, whoops), and now, Detective Inaba, all of them being games that looked very interesting and I wished I could try out.

Most of these games turned out to be pretty decent. Nothing amazing, but still enough for me to be really happy that they ended up getting translated. Detective Inaba follows suit with how it is a game that's pretty good, but ultimately brought down by a few flaws.

Let's start off with the visuals, as this is where one of my biggest problems is. The game is actually rather good looking, at least most of the time. It uses FSM graphics, which if you know, I love me some FSM graphics. The game uses 2x2 pixel art, and I'm really happy the developer, mostly, kept that consistent. Granted, a few things here and there break this rule, most noticably the font and the art, as well as the statues on the third floor.

The mapping is where things got a bit more problematic. Again, most of the stuff here is fine, but there's also some not good looking bits. For example, the stairs on the first floor lying in the middle of the ground, or the unrealistically linear trees of the landslide area. You can tell this developer clearly knows their way around mapping, but still has some things they should probably work on.



My biggest problem with the game's visuals, however, is the game's art. While all of the art in the game looks fine by itself, together, they just don't mash well at all. It feels like every piece of art in this game was drawn by a different artist who made no effort to match the other artists' styles. Which, I believe, is actually what happened judging by the credits. My best guess is that this was a community game where participants could design their characters, but I feel like if that was the case, it would have been more beneficial for the developer to take everyone's designs and redraw them in the game's style (Which I guess is Inaba or Arimura's style? Even those two don't look exactly consistent with each other)

Other than that, I had no other major issues with the visuals (except maybe the font in the title screen looking very comic-y and not fitting the game particularly well). There wasn't really any music that drew my attention in the game, but there was nothing that made my ears bleed either, so that's good.



Onto a better aspect of the game - the story. The game was actually rather well written! There were some predictable things here and there, but it's a whodunnit story and there is only so much you can do with that without being at least remotely predictable.



Also, I did not expect to love Inaba and Arimura both as much as I did. Both of them were such well written characters, and they made a great pair too. At first their dialogue WAS a bit cringey with them giving you exposition just for the sake of exposition (completely ignoring show don't tell), however, I'm more than willing to overlook that considering they ended up being amazing characters as I mentioned. The touch of humour really made the experience stand out more too. The rest of the cast, I didn't really care about. In fact, some of them appeared so little that it was kind of hard to acknowledge that they existed at all (see: the carpenter). They also generally had no character at all besides their jobs or some stereotypical personality type that they never went out of (the carpenter basically being an asshole for the sake of being an asshole, the novelist being cold and distant are the most noticable).



There wasn't much in the way of gameplay either, other than walking around looking for clues. I will say, it was very handy how the developer generally highlighted the things you had to check, it definetly made things less tedius. There is also a pretty cool section at the end where you have to put together the clues to figure out who the killer is. It was rather easy, but still fun.

I guess my biggest problem here would be the lack of polish. There were tons of random cuts that did not feel smooth at all, as well as a few bugs here and there. To elaborate, it would've been much better if the developer had some slow fades to switch between cutscenes, rather than just literal damn teleportation from one to another.

All in all, the game is pretty decent, has an amazing lead and second lead, accompanied by a somewhat fresh whodunnit story. There were visual issues, as well as polish issues, but it was still a game well worth the play. I give the game three and a half ghHhoOouUuUsts out of five.