Thieves beware! With the power of time bending in Crime O’Clock, there is no escape from justice’s arms.
Point-and-click games are very odd when compared to other genres in the market. While most people would rather go on a journey with deep stories or opt for building their own character. Point-and-click, on the other hand, is not a bad genre, but it lacks the action parts of what makes a game stand out. Of course, this is completely a subjective view, most people can enjoy point-and-click games due to their laid-back nature and mind-bending puzzles. Most point-and-click games are about controlling a character and solving puzzles in some way to help them get to point A to point B, but in Crime O’Clock, events occur a bit differently.
Crime O’Clock is a point-and-click game developed by Bad Seed with the intention of finding and solving puzzles by altering and changing time. With its clean UI and color scheme, the game does not cause many issues in understanding its premise. You, the protagonist, are a time detective, trying to solve mysteries and crimes that happen in certain eras of history. You are given a complete black-and-white canvas and your AI companion reports you on crime. The first thing to do is zoom in on the massive, what we would call a giant painting, and spot the problem.
Usually, our AI companion tells us what the problem is and gives us a rough estimate of where to search. By using the mouse wheel, we can zoom in on each event happening on the screen and spot the anomaly. By clicking for a few short seconds, we can mark the problem and get it run down by the AI to explain what is going on. So far it’s referred to as AI, but it is advanced enough to have a regular, human-like conversation. We’d assume it’s just a choice on being more on the friendly side rather than being formal.
Once we find out what is the problem, AI suggests a few things to do in order to learn about the person or event that caused the death or the crime. The companion comes with some programs that can help us gather info about the suspect. These programs are usually basic minigames like match-three or slide-in puzzles to get information about the whole process. It is not that hard in the first levels of encountering them, but in further levels, minigames get a bit more complicated to finish.
Now that we have the background of the person or the crime, the program- Nexus is what is called- reverts back in time for a few ticks to see what actually happened before the crime. It usually involves searching for the suspect before they committed the crime, so this is where the other point-and-click subgenre gets presented: object searching. In a vast, almost completely white canvas, you are ordered to find the specific person near the crime scene that is affiliated with the crime one way or another. It must be said that you need to have a keen eye on spotting items or people because as we said earlier, the entire map is almost white, and finding certain objects can be tricky. Do not worry though, in upcoming stages, Crime O’Clock allows you to have a few hints.
Crime is what we are dealing with, justice needs to take place, which means even after you find the criminal and their murderous acts, you still need to find evidence of why they have done it. As expected, the program reverts the time even further back to finding the suspect and spotting what forced them to do the crime. While most of the time it’s anger and uncontrollable acts. However, as time goes on, we can see some time-altering villains are credited to enforcing or persuading people to commit crimes instead.
Villans differ from each other in how they commit or steer people into crime. One drives people mad over small things to make them commit crimes, the other one shapeshifts to look like the innocent person made it, and so forth. It is important that they are all linked to each other in one way or another, so it is important to watch out for small hiccups during the investigation to spot any out-of-order details.
One of the best elements of Crime O’Clock is its detailed map and extensive storytelling. While you are focusing on the main crime, there are a lot of things going on in the city. Almost all of them have their own unique story, though you are not always inclined to learn about them. By switching time ticks, you can see other timelines slowly unfolding. The tick system is actually well-built, there are 10 ticks in each map, 1 being the earliest and 10 being the latest. As usual, we are dropped around 8 to 10 ticks of a map to see a crime taking place. By going back in time, we revert every action a few ticks and go to the first tick to see where it all started.
There are not many maps to solve crimes in, around five maps to be exact, but they are filled with so many characteristics and stories that adding another map during the playthrough feels like an opening to a whole new level of scavenging for crimes. Some maps include a current-age city, Atlantis, and ancient-era Egypt. Despite all of them being reflective of their timeline, the usage of time ticks and the whole time-traveling business actually leads to finding new people in old times or vice versa.
During your playthrough of Crime O’Clock, you will eventually come across problems such as not being able to find an item or a person. For that, the game actually has a few hint options to help you out locating the suspects. The first one is an obvious hint button located in the top right corner, though it does not entirely tell you where it is, but gives clues on where the object you are searching might be located. As you develop being a better detective, the game then gives you a sound-based hint system that you can use to see if the landmark is close to the object or not. Once you click the landmark, it gives a music note with cold or hot symbols, indicating its relevancy to the crime.
Gameplay-wise, Crime O’Clock is quite simple with its only usage of two buttons only. One of them is the left mouse button, which is used for pointing out crimes or dragging the map around, and the mouse wheel is used as a zooming tool. Talking about zooming, it is astounding that the zoom level is quite high. From being unable to read what is on the map, to zooming enough to see what a person is carrying is a nice game mechanic, it also allows you to pinpoint the little items such as weapons, phones, or books.
Your time on Crime O’Clock does not only spend on solving crimes, there are also minigames included within the maps. By clicking the compass located on the bottom left of the map selection, you are given a completely empty map with no crimes to be found. Instead, you are tasked to find certain individuals that the game wants you to follow. These people range from ordinary people to references to other characters in media like shows, movies, other games, and music. Each map has 7 to 10 characters to follow, giving you a lot of time for scanning to map and get acquainted with every tick possible.
Now, Crime O’Clock is a very decent title, especially if you are into a point-and-click and cozy game with a nice soundtrack. Doesn’t this mean we wouldn’t come across some parts that were, not lacking but completely unnecessary? The time spent on games might not be important for some people, but Crime O’Clock is a bit slow in revealing crimes and letting you go through most of the explanation. You can entirely skip the conversations between you and your companion, sure, but when the game tries to elaborate the situations excessively, it gets tedious to listen to. It is all the winding-up of the villain talk and how we can prevent it every single time when the topic is brought to our attention.
Another little complaint we had was the somewhat repetitive nature of the gameplay. For the first few hours, yes, it was a refreshing experience but as we kept going further, we sort of understood what to expect and do whenever we have a new level or a crime to solve. Without listening to exactly what is going on, you can solve a crime in under 15 minutes or so because getting used to the scenery happens a lot if you keep playing the same maps over and over. For example, if you were to play the first map four times in different intervals when you arrive at the fifth time, you would already know which character is going to be the criminal or predict the story easily.
Despite some very small questionable parts, in general, Crime O’Clock is a neat title to go through. In some ways, Crime O’Clock is a new way of looking at the point-and-click genre with its unique twist on time elements. You are not always in a rush, and take things slowly at your own pace while solving crimes with the help of your companion and visual story-telling. Its art style and charming way of approaching events are also cute, making it a welcoming game for newcomers to the genre as well. Crime O’Clock completely suits people who are searching for a cozy game with investigations, crime, and detective work.
