Loco Motive review: A delightful point-and-click adventure let down by a lackluster mystery

Loco Motive is one of those games that is very easy to enjoy and feel like you are having a great time while playing it. A point-and-click adventure in the vein of the old LucasArts games, this is a fun, exquisitely animated romp through a 1930s Orient Express that delights at almost every turn. It's a murder mystery at its core, though it's not afraid to laugh at itself and employs the same kind of silly puzzle logic that Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle did before it. There are so many things to like about it, so why did I feel increasingly indifferent as I reached the end credits?

I suspect part of this is due to its underlying mystery, which mostly boils down to a fairly rudimentary will dispute, a bit of tax fraud, and not much else. Inheritance disputes aren't the brightest topics at the best of times, and there's only so much comedy that developer Robust Games can squeeze out of jokes about tax evasion and predictably empty coffers (although admittedly, what it manages to come up with is hardships of this rather dry topic is usually very good and made me smile more than a few). More generally, though, it's also the kind of setup that makes it easy to predict who your main villains and suspects will be. Train puns aside, there's nothing 'crazy' about anyone's motives here, and when the big reveal finally comes, it's the kind of inevitable shrug you saw coming a mile away in the middle of the second act.

It's a shame, especially when Loco Motive gets off to such a strong start. Set around the murder of the wealthy Lady Unterwald, who mysteriously drops dead during the reading of her long-awaited and constantly updated will aboard a steam express train, you first take control of her paperwork-loving real estate lawyer, Arthur Ackerman. As this bumbling giant with a heart of gold takes on the role of an improvised detective, he becomes a very affable protagonist as you become familiar with the game's item-based puzzles.

In that classic adventure game mold, Loco Motive is all about applying the right shaped element to any given problem, grabbing and occasionally combining elements from your Tardis-like jacket pocket to create new and increasingly sillier contraptions to solve the problem. problem at hand. Most of the solutions are pretty self-explanatory, although some definitely veer into that “one leap of logic too far” bucket that will have you tearing your hair out or repeatedly running for the built-in advice phone to help you make the missing connections. . Certain puzzle objects can also come from all sorts of unlikely places, requiring careful interrogation of your environment to discover exactly what you need from it.

In fact, with some elements or nuggets of information often hidden behind several nested lines of dialogue, Loco Motive takes this opportunity to put its clever script front and center. The genuinely funny writing does a lot of work here, elevating its cast to feel like they've been plucked straight from the pages of an Agatha Christie novel. From snarky rich widows and idiot sons to sleazy con artists, cunning accountants and over-stressed chefs, to name just a few of the passengers you'll rub shoulders with here, almost all of Loco Motive's characters work very hard to keep you entertained. . Every line is beautifully voiced, and even the most minor characters receive endearing, characterful performances from their respective voice actors, although after a couple of hours of exhaustive digging, the appeal of such detailed text definitely started to weaken a bit. for me. I quickly stopped searching for those extra lines and kept up my research on the topic at hand instead of opting to spend more time in their company.

The construction of the game's individual puzzle arcs is also almost too neat for its own good. The emphasis for solving them is always squarely on how items and events relate to the next link in the ongoing puzzle chain, not on the hows and whys of who actually did it. As a result, the murder itself ends up being relegated to the background, which is perhaps why the final climax falls so flat. Your motivation for helping these characters is never really in service of finding Lady Unterwald's killer, but simply to see what the next fun solution to the puzzle might be. What's more, Loco Motive has a bad habit of concluding a character's story as soon as their puzzle arc is completed, effectively ruling them out as potential suspects and thus further reducing their murder potential.

There's a pretty good attempt at playing with the overall timeline of the murder to add new details and layers of intrigue, as once Arthur's story concludes, the torch is passed to not one, but two additional protagonists. First there is the rather duller detective novelist Herman Merman, whose screeching cries of “No!” and “That doesn't work!” with each incorrect puzzle attempt, in comparison, it makes it an infinitely worse situation. Its story sheds new light on the events leading up to Lady Unterwald's assassination, but once again the game does such a good job of tying up any loose plot threads it introduces here that there's barely anything left for its third and final protagonist: the Inland Revenue secret agent. Diana Osterhagen – to really investigate. In fact, her story arc feels particularly truncated compared to her male counterparts, which is disappointing when she's so much more fun to hang out with than the endless Herman.

But even though Diana's act is perhaps a little rushed on its own, Loco Motive almost manages to pull back for a great puzzle finale that makes excellent use of all three leads. Once again, however, it's the cerebral pieces that stick in memory here rather than the nuts and bolts of the main mystery, which for some may well be enough. For me, it's that tight marriage of plot and puzzle that makes for a great detective game in my books, and Loco Motive never quite strikes the right balance. It's a perfectly fun way to spend six to eight hours, but after the thrilling ingenuity of more recent murder mystery games like The Rise of the Golden Idol, Loco Motive ultimately feels a little flat in comparison. All that said, I'm dying to see what Robust Games ends up doing next, as this studio has a clear passion for point-and-click games, and has already nailed the sense of humor that really makes them sing. If he can connect those dots into a meatier mystery story, I suspect his next game could be absolutely spectacular.

Publisher Chucklefish provided a copy of Loco Motive for review.