Feline Forensics and the Meowseum Mystery Review - A cat-tective mystery
by GamertechAUpublished on
Discover the truth behind a devious museum heist
Disclaimer: I was provided a free game key by the developers via Keymailer
Feline Forensics and the Meowseum Mystery is a brand new indie detective game featuring a museum filled with cute anthropomorphic animal characters.
Using familiar mechanics to other games in the detective genre, the player must collect clues to solve a mystery and save the day!
Feline Forensics is fun and well made. It does have some bugs which at the time of writing, the dev is aware of and working on. Also some of the puzzles can be pretty fiddly.
I did have a good time playing through it, even though my brain is slightly melty by the end of it.
Plot
The cat detective is called to a museum in the town of Philideerphia to investigate the heist of a giant diamond, their most valuable exhibit. Oh, and someone died at the same time, but the diamond's the important part.
The entire museum is locked down until the detective can crack the case and figure out the truth of what happened.
Gameplay
The game shares familiar mechanics to the genre. The detective must travel between per-room scenes to explore the museum, question persons of interest and inspect objects for clues.
Once you have collected enough clues, the player can challenge contradictions in statements and question NPCs again to refine their testimony, getting ever closer to the truth.
To finish off each 'chapter', the player must build their notes by filling in gaps using all the important words, terms and names collected during the investigation to complete each section of the story. This is where I'd say it falls down a bit.
The puzzles feature paragraphs of words and you have to take terms from four categories. People, Locations, Actions and Objects. Unlike games with a similar mechanic such as Duck Detective, the options aren't multiple choice. You can pick from every single word you have and by the end, there's a lot of them.
The paragraphs towards the end are also mostly blanks with very few shown words to help understand the context of what the paragraph's supposed to be about. Gameplay essentially halted completely while trying to figure out which segment of the investigation we're talking about here and the exact words to use which isn't ideal on stream.
There's an option in settings where you can toggle 'hints' which shows what category of word fits in which blank, or 'auto-fill' which as it sounds, automatically fills in the blanks once you have the words discovered. So if you're completely stuck you can go that route. I did honestly consider it more than a few times, but managed to figure it out myself.
Tech
The game ran fine out of the box. The art style and audio was pleasant and fit the vibe well.
There were some bugs. The two bigger ones I encountered are rarely getting stuck on the loading screen while moving between rooms forcing a game restart. Luckily it autosaves regularly, so you wont lose any progress. The other was after finishing the game and clicking continue to go for a different ending, the game loaded in the middle of the museum right before the final scene and allowed me to make different choices. Trying again for another ending wiped all my gathered notes, then again when it completely restarted the game from the beginning instead.
The game just launched, and the dev is actively working on the game, so expect the bugs to be fixed in short order.
The game has a native Linux build. It just released so too early for ProtonDB and Steam Deck ratings, however I don't see anything preventing it from getting Platinum and Verified respectively.
Recommendation
I'd certainly recommend it. While it could use a little improvement with the puzzles, it's fun, challenging and has a decent, family-friendly story.
It took about 9 hours to complete on stream. It'd be much faster if you enabled auto-fill, but would skip a major feature in the game.