There’s a moment early on that signals Indigo Studios’ production woes: an eerie countryside walk undercut by an obvious jump-scare that immediately throttled the framerate and caused a weird audio bug. It’s as though every line was being played through a skipping record and the loudspeaker a tin can. It’s nothing a quick reset couldn’t fix, but thanks to conveniently-spaced checkpoint saves it required restarting the story. Technical errors can show up in any game, but heightened attention feels warranted for shorter linear titles. That also speaks to The Last Case of John Morley as a whole: one can’t help but continually scrutinize the more one digs into this foundation.
Once past any aforementioned bugs, this nightmare sequence in a discomfiting English forest fades away to reveal Morley in a sanatorium. After getting a clean bill of health, and an unfortunate resignation letter from his assistant, he heads back to the office to get situated and form a plan to pay off his debts. That answer practically materializes in front of him through the form of Lady Margaret Fordside: a wealthy widow who’s requested Morley to disinter a 20-year-old murder case of her daughter. Hard to complain about taxing circumstances when in arrears to so many lenders – and her offer so lavish.
It’s sad that this initially promising setup of a classic cold-case detective yarn hardly cares to involve the player.
Morley is obviously an analogue to Sherlock Holmes plopped into the 1940s – who’d probably fit right alongside other notables of the era like Dr. Thorndyke. Similarly, his office contains souvenirs from past adventures to reminisce upon: corkboard and a plethora of red string used in solving The Red Shoes Murder, an umbrella with a bullet hole in it from The Marksman Case, the culprit’s typewriter from The Black Letter Case, and so on and so forth. He even makes an errant comment about the value of his briefcase chemistry kit. Combine these context clues alongside Lady Fordside’s appraisal and you’re intuitively prepared for a detective simulation at an abandoned mansion, almost like a WWII-era Still Life. Think of the possibilities!
Instead, John Morley violates Chekov’s Gun of game design: a quasi-walking sim where Morley himself deduces past events after you’ve pushed a few buttons. Granted, there are short puzzles between revelations; a letter will have the code to a nearby combination lock or a boarded-up barrier needing to be ripped away with a wrought-iron crowbar (all of which like to break after one use). All that’s required between these empty brainteasers is interacting with each sequential green-glowing icon until given the all-clear to move ahead. The process is quite familiar: Morley’s mind palace effectively projects a holographic freeze-frame of an event while averring his theory via voiceover.
Beyond dishonestly teasing a fleshed-out set of systems, the premise’s stakes also feel false. Alright, fine, your mysterious benefactor effectively boarded up the manor and never returned after losing her daughter. Fair enough. To act as though a twenty-year hiatus means it was encased in ice and somehow Morley can immediately reveal the dynamics at play right before this grisly murder doesn’t pass the smell test. That’s why deliberately flaunting and omitting tangible detective work feels so fundamentally wrong here: there’s no buy-in for players to feel they’re learning new facts alongside Morley; no chance for us to even be in Watson’s shoes.
Then again, this lacking synergy couldn’t be accomplished without a hopelessly-contrived narrative altogether. On a surface level, Kim Planella’s script was striving to incorporate an era-appropriate understanding of mental instability. There’s a tantalizing hook in putting that front and center for our Sherlock Holmes stand-in. The problem is it doesn’t maintain lift past the premise; there’s not enough connective tissue – foreshadowing, plotting, etc. – between these beats, to the point where what’s supposed to be a mind-blowing revelation delivers a mixture of confusion and unintentional laughter. Something about its clumsy presentation had this critic chuckling while the credits rolled.
Like gameplay and storytelling, Indigo Studios’ presentational faults also stem back to fundamentals. The allure of Unreal Engine 5 is both a bane and boon. On the one hand, the amount of detail to backgrounds and foggy environs is easy to admire; on the other, the commitment towards realism heightens its weakest aspects as well – namely rough facial animations during dialogue. It’s essentially the dreaded monkey’s paw for modern developers: a ubiquitous engine with an impressive array of tools available to indie teams, yet also straps them with a huge workload to look up-to-par with similar titles. Even with its $12.99 standard price tag and approximate two-hour runtime, it’s easy to tell this budget was stretched.
The issues don’t stop there. Conjoined with lackluster facial animations is underwhelming voice acting. To his credit: Michael Hajiantonis’ John Morley successfully captures a droller type of Sherlock Holmes – at least his more modern renditions (Downey Jr., Cumberbatch, & so on). The supporting cast is rather dull by comparison, on top of a few audio anomalies like extra dialogue squeezed in that’s not listed in subtitles and seemingly recorded somewhere else.
Dialogue sequences in particular are exacerbated further by nettlesome – albeit infrequent – crashes. Whether more like the aforementioned beginning’s audio bug or hard crashes to the main menu, most of them meant rewinding a few minutes back to a previous checkpoint; and with no current dialogue skip option, you simply have to let NPCs recite the same lines over again. Even if not the most unpolished walking sim-lite experience in recent memory (that honor goes to The Berlin Apartment), there’s no justification for a sub-par launch state.
It’s sad to think back to the adventures reminisced in his private office and realize The Last Case of John Morley may very well be his worst. Between the floppiness of this central mystery to the about-face of its initially-promised mechanical ambitions, it’s hard to detect an animating spirit anywhere within this project. Even by Indigo Studios’ own modest means, it also feels rushed out the door thanks to various bugs and crashes. An unfortunate denouement for this fictional detective.
