This review may contain full spoilers, so read at your own discretion.

Camouflage: Case 01 is a game where you play as an investigator (represented by a magic circle) who explores a house which is a crime scene. The objective is to examine objects, find clues, and then make a guess about who the suspect might be.

There are supposedly 6 endings, and the premise is somewhat interesting. The atmosphere starts out fairly decent, and you can examine many objects and talk to your teammates with many dialogue options to learn more. I also like a lot of the custom drawings that are used to depict certain important scenes and drawings made by a kid.

There are some presentations issues here that need to be mentioned. The grammar and dialogue is a little sketchy at times. Some areas are also too dark to see properly, such as the back roof and the rat hole, which I never would have seen if I hadn't read another player's comments. There also seems to be some bugs with the gameplay progression, because I found the note and key once already, but after doing some other things, apparently I could find those 2 items again for some reason.

The flow of the story and the gameplay is very rough around the edges and has some design flaws. One important clue doesn't really lead you to the next clue as you would expect. The process of finding clues does not seem to have a linear or logical progression that makes sense to the player. Often times, you might have already found some clues or items that should logically let you do the next thing, but you can't do it until you do some other arbitrary thing that doesn't even seem to be related.

For example, I had the knife to cut the trunk already, but for some reason I had to find a rat hole before I could interact with the trunk. Then for some unexplained reason, I had to take this unknown package in the trunk to Brick, which contains a hand, and then he had to die. This example also demonstrates how the clues you find up to this point don't necessarily give you any of the needed information to make sense of what is currently happening.

Also, I don't even understand,

There seem to be more layers to the story, and clues that relate to them using yellow and red colored text and sounds. However, the lack of coherent explanation of the story and its progression didn't give me much motivation for wanting to go through the trouble of figuring out the text to find out more. Speaking of which, the teddy bear gives you a password apparently, but it only shows it once, and didn't explain it well, so you can't see the password again if you need it.

Overall, I feel like the creator probably had a good mystery story planned out in their head, but the execution of presenting it to the player was very poor. Unfortunately, finding clues did not give a satisfying sense of unraveling the mystery or explaining anything that was currently happening. I can't give this a great score right now, but I would be willing to reconsider adjusting the rating in the future if there are significant improvements.


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