Who Pressed Mute on Uncle Marcus?

This game was a huge miss for me. It seems like an FMV mystery has great potential, and the filming was well-done, but the story was lackluster, and the actual user experience utterly ruined it for me. In a somewhat contrived "quiz game" format, you have a limited number of chances to interact with each suspect, and your conversations are filled with split-second 50/50 decisions that ultimately come down to, do you want to just cut to the chase or do you want to pander to them to try to get them to spill information? There is no skill or actual information that would reveal what the right thing to say is here, which will make it frustrating if you accidentally pick the wrong option and then will be forced to go through the whole scene again on a replay.

Also, even though I knew this was a game that may require replay to gather all the information, it was a bit unclear to me from the beginning whether I was "supposed" to be able to get all the info in one go (I wasn't), and I wish the game would have hinted this to me somehow. And this isn't officially a "time loop" scenario in the story even though it effectively is one for the player, so future playthroughs aren't responsive to the information gained from the first time through, but you get to keep all the evidence you've collected. This is only minorly awkward but leads to scenes on subsequent playthroughs where basically characters are just telling you stuff you've already heard from other characters or even from themselves. The evidence collection interface was also shaky; for the first piece of evidence I collected, it told me to press "E" to view all the evidence, and when I did so I found there was no evidence listed there, which was pretty confusing given that it was my first exposure to this panel. For some reason that particular piece of evidence never turned up even on future playthroughs, which I suspect was a glitch.

The scene skipping feature was the real deal-breaker though. While the scenes do fit quite seamlessly together the first time through, on the second time it starts to feel awkward as you see large chunks of scenes turning up again with minor differences spliced in. It's hard to tell exactly which scenes are skippable, and some long scenes actually overlap quite a bit, forcing you to rewatch parts of scenes you've already seen just to gain a few seconds of (not necessarily useful) new info. This could have easily been implemented to make the scenes skippable in smaller increments and to clearly allow which scenes could be skipped. The most egregious problem with this, though, was on my second playthrough when after 45 mins of collecting information from suspects, I had enough evidence to accuse the person I wanted to. A long scene I'd already scene came on so I pressed "tab" to skip and it wouldn't skip, so I rapidly hit "tab" a few more times. And there it not only skipped the scene, but also instantly jumped me ahead through a question prompt where the question was apparently whether I should trust Uncle Marcus that he was dying. Unfortunately it registered my "Tab" press as to keep the default answer of "no", so I hung up the phone on him, and the scene cut straight to Uncle Marcus's funeral and the end credits. No opportunity to accuse this suspect, barely a chance to even process what had just happened ... I couldn't believe it! And if I want to accuse that person, I'll have to play through another round full of "skippable" but not really skippable scenes. Needless to say though, at this point I'm just going to Google the ending because it's just not worth it for me.