At every step of where this game succeeds at uncovering environmental storytelling, it faceplants and fully disappointing at what the story is that you're actually uncovering. Not to mention that not every case is actually successful at that story telling, so its not even worth it in my opinion to play for that sake.

Long story short: I would not ever recommend this game to a friend because I am sure any friend of mine would find the stories they uncover upsetting and extremely odd.

Long story long?:

I would like to know who wrote this and I would like to know why they made the choices they did.

Upsetting narrative choices like: Child prostitution Mass shootings False rape accusations mental break in a schizophrenic person

Why did you choose this? When you write a story, you have the ability to put anything you want, and the only restrictions are the theme you choose or narrative consistency. There is no cohesive moralistic theme for these cases, there are themes for each case file (with 3 cases in them) but the theme is a location, or the same person's story . These are not moralistic themes so why do we have these upsetting narratives choices? Why is the world you chose for this game a world that sucks where a dad tries to line up his underage daughter to be prostituted whilst another, good dad, dies for trying to make things right? A world where you chose to make a story where an assault accusation is fake and the person dies for it.

These choices: 1. suck and 2. make finding out the stories an exercise in constant disappointment and overtly disturbing. This is not L.A. Noire. The theme of the game is not noire. If it is, it is not even good at having a point to the feeling of ennui that the player experiences, we are not playing a consistent, deep character, you are just literally upsetting your audience for weird reasons.

If this game was the same gameplay but with better stories that actually made me feel some kind of resolution at the end, this would be a different review. I want to see a new version of this game but with a better writer.

A serious step down from Painscreek.

The whole game doesn't feel like I'm investigating crime scenes. It feels like I'm solving long form riddles. Some of the assumptions I was meant to make seem pretty flimsy. I arbitrarily don't have access to very basic information about the case. There is some sort of asinine neo-future robot voice talking to me between missions. Overall I wasn't having any fun.