The Darkside Detective: A Fumble in the Dark

i always had fun during the first couple episodes, because they are pretty easy to get through and i felt satisfied with my efforts to complete each episode. detective mcqueen and officer dooley are an entertaining duo to watch. the pixel graphics are charming. the game's humor is initially amusing, but wears out its welcome after some episodes. the game makes ample use of dad-joke type humor, and a lot of it isn't exactly clever, or even worthy of a snort out the nose. the stories and locales in each episode are interesting (up until i lost my patience trying to solve the later cases without a guide).

my biggest gripe by far for this game is i felt the need to use a guide to solve the later episodes. an important mechanic in this game is the combining of items that you find as you explore the levels, or dragging and dropping found items onto somewhere specific in a level to "use" the item. some of these "solutions" seem completely illogical, something i'd never think to do myself, which was frustrating.

by the time i reached the later episodes, my patience for the gameplay, dialogue, and humor was wearing thin. i was tired of combining random items in a trial-and-error fashion to see if anything worked, or dragging and dropping anything anywhere to see if something happened. i would get as far as i could on my own before i whipped out a guide to essentially rush through the latter half of a given episode because i was so disenchanted with the gameplay and dialogue that i just wanted to finish the episode. the later episodes tend to be longer than the earlier ones and i felt a lot of the length ended up being mindless detours or dialogue that detracted from the story or goal of the given episode.

overall, i don't regret playing this game. the amount of useless "funny" dialogue could be dialed back. maybe folks more clever than i am will have an easier time enjoying the game start to finish.