Frederick and Diane in: The Case of the Golden Dragon

Intro

"Frederick and Diane in: The Case of the Golden Dragon" is a short visual novel developed by TRIDIUM using RPG Maker MZ that was created for The Mighty Jam. A game jam hosted by The Mighty Palm over on itch.io whose jam was dragon themed and gave developers a week to put something together. Suffice to say this didn't give TRIDIUM a lot of time to come up with puzzles or areas to explore in search of clues. As a result this visual novel is rather short and the mystery rather easy to crack. In fact, I was able to beat it in under 15 minutes on my first try, but I do judge game jam submissions on a sliding scale.

Story
Summary

We play as a detective and his assistant who've been brought in to investigate the death of Mr. Henry. A man of some wealth whose bloody corpse was recently found in his bathroom by his crimson haired maid. Though by the time we got there the corpse had been removed, but maybe this is for the best considering Frederick is rather squeamish and tends to get a bit woozy when looking at blood and we don't have time for him to faint on a couch. Plus we don't need to see his body to figure out who killed him anyway.

The Suspects
Lady D
A self-admitted gold digger whose more annoyed with Henry's death than anything else since it means she'll need to find a new rich guy to tie the knot with.

Hobbes
The butler whose been working for Mr. Henry for over a decade and who finds many of Brittaney's activities absolutely scandalous. He also wears an eye-patch and that makes him suspicious by default. After all, the only other people know to wear eye-patches are pirates and pirates love golden booty.

Brittaney
An air-headed lesbian that thinks Mr. Henry was potentially killed by "them" and regularly forgets her orders as soon as she leaves the room she is currently in.

Strengths/Weaknesses

This game will either live or die on it's comedy in my opinion. This is because the mystery isn't that deep nor are the puzzles that challenging. As a result this game really needs to amuse the player with it's wit and character banter. And in my opinion the game largely succeeds on that front, but comedy is extremely relative. So I can easily imagine others not liking this game because they feel it's not particularly amusing.

Gameplay

A rather basic adventure game where were allowed to search a few rooms in search of clues in order to figure out who murdered Mr. Henry. These clues can range from obvious codes to those a little less obvious involving colors and letters. Of course at the end of the case were allowed to name the person who did it. And if you guess poorly you'll suffer a horrible fate.



Though, I suppose it might be worthwhile to guess poorly at least once since you can save before you name your suspect. So it's not like you'll have to play through the game a second time in order to get it right.

Graphics

On the graphical side of things the game utilizes assets created by a few different people. Though oddly enough these assets gel rather well in my opinion. So I'll give TRIDIUM credit for bringing together an assortment assets that are done in a similar style. Though, I suppose some would argue this is a pretty obvious thing to do. I've played more than a few demos in the last couple of weeks that use assets from Pokémon, Chrono Trigger, and the RTP at the same time. As such, I consider this an important skill to have even if it's obvious one. After all, it's usually the small things in life that get under my skin the most some days.

Sound

As usual I don't have a lot to say about this aspect of the game. While the game definitely has some original tracks going for it composed by Meg Murphy. My feelings on those tracks is that they are rather average as such I mostly forgot about them as soon as I closed the game. On a brighter note I can't think of any tacks that were used inappropriately or felt out of place. So I don't have any complaints about the music or sound effects TRIDIUM used.

Conclusion

While "Frederick and Diane in: The Case of the Golden Dragon" isn't a particularly good mystery game in my opinion. It does manage to save itself as a comedic game that has a mystery as a means to get our cast together so they can play off of each other. So while I feel this game is definitely worth a quick play if you have around 15 to 20 minutes to spare. I can easily see this game rubbing some people the wrong way if they don't enjoy TRIDIUM's sense of humor. Even so this game does make for a good review target if your looking for a short game to play and review.