I’ve played a little. It’s okay. The one I was playing didn’t do anything approximating the Mind Palace and was very, very linear-- which I think is better than the Sherlock Holmes style games. It was the everything else about it that annoyed me into turning it off!
I love mystery games, so–
Love: When mystery games actively draw attention to the idea that you need to draw your own conclusions about what you find in the game, and make your own truth, instead of just following a track
Hate: when the above is expressed as a formalized “Mind Palace” mechanic à la the more recent Sherlock Holmes games. That’s just covering the track with a tarp instead of letting you build your own theories. Either let people accuse who they want with the evidence they have (once again I plug Paradise Killer) or acknowledge that there’s only one acceptable answer
That’s why I got Nebula. It’s not everyone I watch on YouTube, but it’s a lot of the best people, and they get a much, much larger amount of revenue from me specifically than they do from even YouTube Premium at a better price since you’re not also paying for YouTube Music on top of it. I was a devoted Google Play Music All Access listener, but true to form Google forgot about it and then replaced it with a worse service that costs more money. Spotify and Nebula as separate subs is as close as I’m going to get to the old school GPMAA/YouTube Red bundle and I don’t have to give a penny to Google for it
I will always, always, always go to bat for Parade Killer. I think half my comments on Lemmy have been shilling for it. I desperately want more mystery games like it. Not just for the reasons you described, but because it so, so, SO completely nails the relationship between its aesthetic and its plot question about what it means to have institutional power in a institution that’s downright malicious. The player character is explicitly a tool of the evil Syndicate. Is she even interested in effecting change? Could she if she was? Is Paradise worth saving?