Crime O’Clock review

• Reviews by Matt Aukamp
• Published:

Casual time-travel mystery looks wonderful but is so streamlined it leaves little time for fun

Alright, detective, we need your help to solve a mystery that threatens to disrupt the whole video game time continuum! That mystery is: Where is the line between “adventure game” and “casual hidden object” game?

Crime O’ Clock, by developer Bad Seed, left me pondering this question for its whopping 20-hour-long play time. It’s a narrative game with a cogent story that runs underneath what turns out to be an incredibly linear “Where’s Waldo”-like experience. While the artwork is impressive, the gameplay is restricted to mere moments of object hunting and mini-games between seemingly endless exposition, which makes for a cute but unfulfilling experience.

In Crime O’Clock, you’re an investigator saddled with the responsibility of solving anomalies in the space-time continuum, led by an A.I. companion named E.V.E. that lives in your computer. E.V.E. is a faceless colored circle that appears on your screen next to long, scrolling lines of dialogue. You will be alerted to some anomaly – maybe a “disturbance” has occurred near a local museum – when your A.I. pal pops up and bids you enter one of five time periods to find it. Each time period is basically a large, crowded 2D scene filled with characters, objects, buildings, and events, all beautifully drawn in black and white. The first time you see one of these scenes, your jaw will drop from how neatly illustrated and stuffed with charm it is. When you find out that each scene has ten different time views, where all the objects and characters move about and change, the effect becomes even more impressive.

Let me stop and explain: You have a large isometric view of a scene in front of you. Like a “Where’s Waldo” book, characters and objects caught in the middle of their daily lives will be littered all about the picture. For example, the Information Age shows a few blocks of a modern city with stores, cafés, a park, and some subway entrances, within which little anthropomorphic animal characters are also scattered about, frozen in a fixed tableau. An elephant-person may be driving their scooter, or a cat-man playing with their dog, or a bird-lady sipping tea at a café. You can click and drag to scroll around the screen with your mouse, or zoom out using your mouse wheel (or buttons on the screen) to focus in or pan out if you wish to check a minute detail or see the whole landscape. 

Each Age, including others such as the Egyptian-inspired Lost Age and the Victorian-inspired Steam Age, has ten “ticks,” which are different moments in time. In tick 1, you might see a man balancing on the top of a ladder, while in tick 2, he’s toppled to the ground. The idea is that, if you’re tracking a criminal, you can follow them through time to see them move about the scene and track them back and forth to learn the information you need.

The amount of illustration and thoughtfulness that had to be employed to pull this off is astonishing. All five Ages are fairly large and incredibly detailed, and they hold a sense of continuity for every character and object through all ten ticks of time. You can even track insignificant background characters and see them have entire sub-stories that never play into the main narrative whatsoever. It’s not only impressive, but it also shows an admirable sense of love and care on the part of the creators. When you first drop into a scene, all you want to do is click through the ticks and take in every square inch. But unfortunately, you can’t really do that.

Back to your assignment as an A.I.-assisted time detective. Each case takes place entirely within a single Age and must be done in order, so you start by opening up whichever Age the current mystery takes place in. You begin with access to only one Age but will quickly unlock three more, while the fifth and final Age isn’t unlocked until about ten hours into the game. So as you start your first case, you’re looking at this image, you’re thinking about how cool both the artwork and the premise are, and then you come to the actual gameplay. You click through E.V.E.’s dialogue. It’s talking a bit much, you think, but no matter! Soon I’ll be digging through scenes, moment by moment, following leads and solving mysteries! Then, when you’re let off the leash and told to find some anomaly, you dutifully go about searching the entire scene. You’re stuck in this one tick, but it’s the beginning of the game, so that’s fine. Eventually, you find the crime and you click on it. A snapshot appears overtop, and your A.I buddy pops up again to congratulate you on a fine job. Then it tells you you’ll have to travel back in time to find out what happened. Here we go!

E.V.E. takes you back maybe five ticks in time and sets you on your mission to follow some lead on that screen. You scour the scene and find what the A.I. is asking for, and then return to another load of time-and-technology-babble dialogue. Something about “chronal registers of the time-flux matrix emitting temporal resonances which we will detect through an algorithmic subroutine.” Okay? Now E.V.E. tells you it needs to run that subroutine, which ends up being a pair-matching mini-game. Or a mini-game of cycling through two overlapping images until they match. Or a mini-game of clicking a series of icons as they pop up, slowly, one after the other. Or a mini-game of matching two frequencies by altering the wavelength and size. And then you’re back in the scene and the A.I. takes you forward a tick and tells you another very specific thing to find.

Instead of ever giving you control over your own investigation, the entire game progresses this way. You read through an immense amount of semi-sensical sci-fi bafflegab and then search thoroughly for one particular thing and then maybe play a mini-game, and then do it all again. So what at first looked like an open time-traveling mystery-solving challenge now feels like a somewhat dull visual novel interrupted by “Where’s Waldo” sessions and incredibly simple mini-games.

The story goes that several rogue A.I.s have escaped into the timestream and are influencing fictional historical figures to run amok and disrupt the flow of history. Every time you solve a “case,” you come closer to shutting down one of these A.I.s and figuring out what conspiracy lies behind this whole mess. 

This narrative does have many interesting ideas, like a twist counterplot that emerges about halfway through the game, and the idea of altering an entire society’s moral system to prevent a few time-crimes. You can’t stop any crimes yourself, because that would interfere too much with the timestream, so you (or rather, E.V.E.) will have to find ways to manipulate the world into stopping the criminal for you. As you progress, the game gives you access to some welcome tools that add depth to the scenes, such as a hammer that allows you to destroy containers and see what’s inside, and a module that allows you to look into certain buildings. But the relentless exposition from the A.I. companion is so constant, it leaves you with a very distinct case of “Who cares?” even if the individual mysteries or overall story are interesting.

I don’t mean to give the impression that the game is written poorly. The writing is often quite cute or funny, and the mysteries are generally fun little stories. Much of the dialogue (or monologue, for the most part) is clever enough to give you a passing chuckle, and if you like pop culture references, this game is chock full of them. It’s just that the exposition is so exhausting that it can be hard to enjoy these things. The music is also incredibly well done and serves as an exciting, rhythmic background for your little hunts. Each era’s music has a different flavor that suits the scene, but with distinctly modern twists.

If you really want to be let off the hook and explore these scenes freely, the game does offer it. Each Age has a mode where you can search around at your own pace with no A.I. companion and click through time ticks as you like. There are no mysteries in this mode, however. There are around eight characters, all of which are pop-culture analogues (“Dwayne” is Maui from Moana, while “Bee Bee Holt” is BB-8 from Star Wars, etc.,) who live out a tiny story throughout the ten ticks. You might follow “Howard Hatecraft” as he wanders about the city, looking for story ideas, or the “Hero Turtles” as they train to fight crime with their new rat friend. This mode is definitely more freeing but far more casual, as it removes the overarching narrative and the investigation aspects from the equation, and you simply search around the scene for a specific character, then do it again on the next tick.

Final Verdict

Overall, my investigation has concluded that Crime O’ Clock probably falls much more under the “hidden object” genre than the full-fledged “adventure” genre, but still deserves a nod for its narrative through line and a hat tip to its detective themes that complement the meticulously detailed hand-drawn artwork. If you like futuristic time-travel stories told visual-novel style, and you enjoy casual gameplay that doesn’t require a lot of investment, this game might certainly scratch an itch. Though even then, it’s probably best enjoyed one 10-15 minute “case” at a time rather than being played for longer sessions. Its smart-looking design and intriguing concepts will draw you in, but repetitive, simplistic investigations and constant exposition may just push you back out before too long. 

Matt played Crime O'Clock on PC using a review code provided by the game's publlsher.