Detective: Rainy Night Nintendo Switch Review 6/10 *Care for a room, detective?* 🕵️‍♀️☔ @K148_GS #IndieGame #GameDev

I covered k148 Game Studio’s Detective: The Motel back in January, and whilst I relished the thought of the basic premise – a short detective title focused in a single location – the execution and layout of the game really hindered my enjoyment. Fast forward to the end of the year, and I got to tuck into Detective: Rainy Night, a title that moves away from tedious box-ticking exercises and instead more towards a supernatural, psychological horror bent. Good!

The POV adventure begins with your character arriving at a supposedly rural hotel (more on this later), with your character getting to briefly know the inhabitants of the scattered rooms, as well as the kindly motel manager. 

After a quick kip, you wake up to find that the heavy rain from the night before has now morphed into an impenetrable fog (again, more on this later) and to make matters worse, one of the temporary residents of the motel has been murdered, leaving you to don your detective cap and try to get to the bottom of what the heck is going on.

As much as I had fun with Detective: Rainy Night, there are a lot of caveats here. Whilst I enjoyed how stripped back and focused the narrative was – it’s a game that can be completed in a couple of hours – the game is very ‘assety’ and that does bite it on the arse somewhat.

For example, you are supposed to be in the middle of nowhere, but you can clearly see many houses around the motel, and at one point towards the ending, there’s a glitch (at least I assume its a glitch) in which you can openly leave the area and see the awkward surroundings/limitations of the street that the motel is plonked on. 

It doesn’t help that the burgeoning narrative really tries to drive home the fact that this motel is supposed to truly be miles out of town and almost unreachable. The sparsity of audio works with the unfolding tale, and I enjoyed how the story is set over five nights (shout out to the awesome Five Days a Stranger), with the creeping imminence of death closing in as the hapless residents get picked off one by one.

Again, as much as there are strengths in the interesting premise, the character models move like they are encased in cement, and the dialogue is less than ideal. The light environmental puzzles and brief fetch quests never slowed the pace down, and the character archetypes work insomuch as they fill a hole; you’ve got a moody young woman, an unhappy couple (the male is possible the horniest person I’ve ever encountered in a game, there should honestly be a copy of Readers Wives poking out of his jacket pocket), a miserable rich bitch, a chubby food-focused schlub, and an alpha male – but it all works in the sense that this is a trashy horror story.

SUMMARY
All in all, when playing Detective: Rainy Night, it’s best to keep in mind that this is the work of a single individual, and quite frankly this is light years ahead of their previous releases. 

Whilst I’ve only rated this a 6/10, I’m genuinely looking forward to what the developer hits us with next, as there really is something here, and I hope that in a year or two I’m singing the praises of their newest release to the high heavens. 

As it stands though, this is flawed, silly fun that will appeal to those that like to smash through a light-horror title of an evening, and there’s absolutely nothing at all wrong with that.

6/10 

🧊💦MELTING🧊💦

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(also available on PS5, PC, Xbox Series X/S)

Developer – k148 Game Studio [SOLO DEV]

Publisher – Jandusoft