Best of All

Intro

"Best of All" is a short mystery game developed by pianotm using RPG Maker 2003 that was created for A Rainbow of PosiTWOvity event. An event held celebrate pride month back in 2022 that also gave birth to complete games like "Blue and Iris vs Ghosts" and demos such as "Lovestar Kingdom".

Story
Summary

We play as Georgie, a private investigator, hired to track down Gloria Hartman's last will and testimony. A task that is super important because her estate is cash poor, but highly valuable due to the family owning a beachfront property that is worth an estimated $127,000,000 and if her will isn't found the family will be forced to sell the building to the highest bidder in order to divide her estate up evenly between them. After all, it's a lot easier for a judge to parcel out money than it is for a judge to divide up a condo complex.

Of course, the real question is if there are sinister forces at play behind the scenes or is everything that is going on just a mere series of "happy" accidents.

Oogway
There are no accidents.

Greatest Strength/Weakness

Sadly it appears Master Oogway is wrong in this case. As far as I can tell the will disappearing, the blueprints going missing, and one of the most aggressive bidders using the same firm as the recently diseased are all apparent accidents. Though maybe I'm failing to look underneath the underneath in this case or the lack of voice clips or visual reactions to certain information coming to light makes it a lot harder to tell when Phil is trying to save his law firms backside from getting caught in a massive conflict of interest. At any rate the lack of a big conspiracy really hurts this game in my opinion since it means we only have on small mystery to solve and we know the answer to where the will is rather early on. Even if it takes us a lot longer to get all of the pieces in place to know exactly where to look in Gloria's bedroom for the secret entrance to her reading room.

On the plus side most of the cast is pretty fun to interact with, but the repeated dialogue you need to get through in order to ask another question is rather annoying. And it kind of sucks that you can't ask certain questions after you've asked them about the more important stuff to your case first. After all, maybe I wanted to compliment Phil on his totally fly jacket after discussing everything else first!



Minor Dialogue Error

I noticed in one of the early conversation in this game that one of the character's repeats the same line twice.



An error I didn't see anywhere else, but still felt like mentioning in order to pad the review out a bit.

Gameplay

On the gameplay front there isn't a lot to this game. You simply go from location to location in order to interact with certain people and ask them questions which might reveal usual information on where Gloria hid her will. A task that will take around 30 to 40 minutes to complete. And that's really all there is to the main game.

There is also a dice game you can play in Georgie's favorite bar, but considering it's only purpose is to waste the player's time with a meaningless mini-game. I really didn't see any point in playing it. After all, if I wanted to spend time on a game of chance in order to earn fake money I could play "World Championship Poker 2: Featuring Howard Lederer" on my PS2.

Graphics

Graphically the game features a combination of RTP assets, edits to the RTP, and assets bought from the White Screw store. As an overall package this game is pretty solid in terms of visuals. Though I still find it a bit weird that Steve has a tub so big it looks like the sides are taller than the player. So how you get in his bath tub is beyond me.


That is some tub!

Sound

Sound wise the game relies on a bunch of music tracks from incompeteccom. On the plus side this does mean the game isn't relying on the same old RTP tracks I've heard a few dozen times at this point. On the other hand, I'm not sure the music selected for this game really captures the feel pianotm was going for. After all, this game is tagged as being part of the noir genre. And that genre has a certain look and sound associated with it.

Conclusion

"Best of All" is a bit of a mixed bag in my opinion. The overall mystery surrounding the will doesn't feel that deep since we get told it's hidden in a secret room in the condo extremely early on. And even know where the secret entrance has to be located to a certain extent rather early on as well. The real trick is gathering enough clues so Georgie can get into the condo in order to access this hidden room and find Gloria's last will and testament. Add in a story that really doesn't have the edge of a noir story and were left with a rather tame game about a pretty simple mystery. As a time killer this isn't bad in my opinion, but I don't see this game as something I'll revisit anytime soon since there are better ways to pass the time in my opinion. At the same time this is an event game so I'll give the overall score a bit of a bump since those come with time constraints and other restrictions that can hamper certain ideas.