Crime Story

A while back, I wrote about a board game called Detective. It's a sort of "escape room adjacent" experience that presents crimes for the players to cooperatively investigate. It's also not the only game released at roughly the same time that tries to capture that flavor.

Chronicles of Crime has the same core premise, but "turned left" with certain design decisions where Detective "turned right." Chronicles of Crime is integrated with a smartphone app, in a similar way to Mask of the Pharaoh: when you "visit a crime scene" during the game, one of the players looks through 3D glasses at an image projected on their phone. They get to spin around in all directions as though actually at the scene, describing everything they see to the other players in an effort to mine the case for clues.

On the plus side, the production values of Chronicles of Crime feel better than those of Detective. The "you're at the crime scene" gimmick is a neat one, and well realized. Where Detective doles out cards crammed with story text you must read, Chronicles of Crime is very visual -- you see illustrations of suspects and witnesses you can interview, representations of clues you find, and more.

This should make the experience feel more immersive and real. And it does... when you're the one looking at the 3D environment. And that's where Chronicles of Crime really falls short for me. First, it's an arbitrary gameplay construct that doesn't match the flavor of the game at all. Are we all on an investigative team together or aren't we? Why can't we all go to the scene of crime? Why can't each of us have a chance to look around? What real-world investigative team shows up with all but one of their members blindfolded, for just one person to describe everything? What real-world investigative team doesn't take pictures and videos that can be viewed by the people off-site? Story-wise, it's nonsense.

Gameplay-wise, it's also not as fun as Detective. Only one person gets to engage with the game's primary gimmick. You can take turns with who that is each time you investigate a new scene, but if you let multiple people stop to look at the same scene, it consumes your "time" resource in the game. Basically, group enjoyment comes at a cost of group success -- which is frankly a terrible decision to be forced to make.

Trying to foster cooperation when only one player in the group has complete information doesn't work out particularly well. Plus, the game doesn't do a good job of giving everyone else something to do. Each player gets their own "consultant" you can look to during a case, to essentially process the clues and evidence you gather. But not every consultant is used in every case, so sometimes during a game, there's nothing that you personally can do.

So in the end, Chronicles of Crime feels to me like one of those games with a truly nifty gimmick at the core... and a deficient game built around that gimmick. Detective was an experience I enjoyed seeing through to the end. After sampling Chronicles of Crime, I'm not sure I'll ever be playing it again. I give it a C.