Detective Instinct: Farewell, My Beloved (Demo Impression)

Written by Jared T. Hooper on 06 Jan 2025

Over the years, I've played titles like Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective and the first Ace Attorney game, and although I enjoyed them greatly—the former sits in my top five favorite games—I only played them when the mood struck. It wasn't until I played Master Detective Archives: Rain Code this past summer that I realized how real I'm into detective games, and while perusing my Steam wishlist for a new detective game, I stumbled upon an indie adventure game I'd forgotten I'd added called Detective Instinct: Farewell, My Beloved.

The Premise

Detective Instinct starts out how all great detective stories start: with a man getting yeeted out a window. We then jump perspectives to our game's narrator, a college student named [insert name here], who's rudely awoken by a cop accusing him of murder. After proving he could not have, in fact, yeeted a man out a window, [insert name here] meets the detective in charge of the case and regroups with his friend and classmate, a young lady named Emma. The two are on a university-sponsored trip across mainland Europe, and the detective, saying “Protocol, schmotocol,” invites them onto the crime scene to help aid in the investigation.

The Gameplay

Gameplay here isn't what one would imagine when they think gameplay. There's no running, no gunning, no decorating a room or powerwashing the mold off side paneling. The “gameplay” by the loosest definition of the term, is navigating menus, i.e., the thing we do when we're using a word processor or trying to find a business's customer support line, and I don't think anybody's that taken with checking their word count. But the item to keep in mind is that the inputs you're making are not the termination of what determines a game's engagement, but rather, it's how those inputs influence the thoughts you have and the emotions you feel, and it's this state of mind I'm describing as I discuss the demo's gameplay.

This being a detective game, the primary gameplay loop is examining a crime scene, gathering the evidence, and using that evidence to figure out whodunit, howdeydunit, and so on. Despite the first thing you examine being the chalk outline of a man who went splat after a defenestration, the very first mystery you solve is the owner of a wallet you find in a bush. You're not allowed to just peek into the wallet and check the ID, so you have to eavesdrop on the surrounding police officers to narrow down its owner. It's a simple puzzle but a good one for easing the player in. My gripe is that while I was able to narrow down the owner based on the available clues, there wasn't that definitive piece to suggest the owner, at least not that I was able to find, so it led to me guessing wrong. Admittedly, my wrong guess did result in a gag that got a good laugh out of me, so that much made it worth the incorrect answer.

While I said an extra definitive clue would've aided in my investigation, I can't help but wonder if that's not the game's subtle way of teaching me not to assume anything, because subtlety is this game's strong suit. The owner of the wallet is the game's tutorial to its mechanics, and it's integrated so smoothly, it almost flew over my head that I was playing the tutorial. If a pal sat me down and told me this was the second or third case in the game, I probably wouldn't have realized the hoops I was jumping through were for beginners.

The secret sauce to this smooth integration is the merging of the story with the gameplay. Everything explained to the player relates just as much to the story as it does their interface without referencing the interface at all. The characters talk as if they're people in a novel, not NPCs instructing you that if you press TAB, that opens up your evidence file, or that yellow text on your command menu indicates a new dialogue option. While games do sometimes need to provide direct instruction on their mechanics and controls, particularly for things that aren't intuitive, my respect for a game increases immeasurably when it drops a player into a level and makes them figure it out for themselves while also tailoring the level's design so that they do figure it out for themselves, and that's what Detective Instinct does. It knows that if you like detective games, you're probably a smart person, and it respects your intelligence to figure out its mechanics on your own.

Other Stuff

After playing the demo, you're invited to fill out a survey on your thoughts and opinions, and while doing so, I learned from the developer that the scene where a cop is attempting to falsely arrest you is apparently the very first puzzle, not the wallet's owner, which puzzled me to no end. There are no pieces for the player to locate and snap together, and the situation is “solved” when the narrator blurts out the answer, which the player has no way of choosing as a dialogue option, let alone knowing.

This does have me worried for the quality of puzzles and mysteries in the game's final release, as while the demo's puzzles were decent appetizers, they're lacking the substance or steps necessary to turn them into puzzles the player can truly solve.

The demo's littered with characters, and despite its brief length, far and away, the lead detective, Daltrey, steals the spotlight. He has this freewheeling personality and approach to his job that's so lackadaisical, the real mystery is how he keeps his job. He sort of reminds me of Detective Gumshoe from Ace Attorney, except while Gumshoe is a genuine, lovable imbecile, Detective Daltrey throws caution to the wind and operates on gut feelings over what some pencil pusher back at HQ dictates.

I had planned on making a section dedicated solely to the characters, but with so many individuals competing over the limited screen real estate, there isn't much to say about them other than to describe their broad personalities in a single sentence. I'm just impressed Daltrey is able to make such a huge impression, and given the added length of the full game, I do believe the rest of the cast can stand firmly on their own two feet.

One final thing I would like to praise is a tiny thing, and it's the text crawl. Rather than displaying letters at a consistent clip, words will stutter out or pause as the speaker hesitates. The Ace Attorney games do this as well, and Detective Instinct combines this with the option to alter the text speed. For reference, I set the text speed of every game I play to either fast or instant, and Detective Instinct manages to balance the line between my reading convenience and making these characters feel more human and alive with the variations in their line displays. It's a small detail but one with huge ripple effects, and I applaud and respect the dev team for implementing a feature whose timing was probably a nightmare to get right, as well as was plain tedious to implement.

Conclusion

A lot of spit and polish has gone into making Detective Instinct: Farewell, My Beloved a product that's easy to get into and that respects the player's time and intelligence. Its puzzles do leave me wanting for more, and the demo's only thirty minutes, and I could've used another half hour to determine if this game would properly hook me. Just from these thirty minutes, however, I could see the love and care that's gone into making Detective Instinct, although I could've gotten away with just browsing the creator's Twitter page to see that much, because it's an endless tower of passion and praise for adventure games, and I'm a little jealous they love a single genre to such a degree.

Detective Instinct: Farewell, My Beloved will be coming out not just on PC, but Switch consoles as well, so detectives will be able to solve mysteries from both the comfort of their own home and on the go. While no set release date exists as of yet, players shouldn't have to wait more than a few months at time of writing to get their hands on a love letter to adventure games and an homage to a bygone era of gaming, when backgrounds were prerendered and the anime color palette was muted. And maybe then they'll see the amazing stories and wonderful characters this niche genre has to offer.