The End of the Trail

Feel, don't think. Use your instincts.

"The Phantom Menace" 

And just as I finish writing this review, I remember I never wrote one for Staffer Case even though I finished it months ago...

Professor Martin has brought two of his students, Emma and her friend (whose name is decided on by the player), from the United States to the country of Vendreka in Europe for a research trip. On the night before they board the train back to London, a murder occurs in the hotel they are staying: a person had been shot and fell several stories down to his death. Their interests piqued, the unnamed protagonist and Emma snoop a bit around the crime scene and befriend the police detective in charge, who allows them to look a bit around. The following day, professor Martin and his pupils board the train, which will take a few days to reach London. On the second day however, Emma is baffled by a mysterious disappearance. She had befriended a fellow passenger the previous evening and promised to meet her again this second day, but the woman didn't appear. That on its own might not be cause for any concerns, but when Emma asked the staff and fellow passengers who had been in the lounge carriage too at the time about the woman, nobody seems to remember having seen such a woman and in fact, it appears Emma might have been all alone in the lounge car. At first, Emma thinks she's going crazy, but as she and the protagonist poke around a bit, they stumble upon the possibility there had indeed been a woman on board, who has now disappeared. Can the two find out what happened to the missing woman in the 2025 game Detective Instinct, Farewell My Beloved, available for PC and Switch?

When developer Armonica LLC first announced Detective Instinct, Farewell My Beloved back in 2023, it caught my attention immediately. The developers were not shy about what the main inspiration was for their baby-in-the-making: Japanese adventure games, with command-style adventures like Famicom Detective Club, Gyakuten Saiban/Ace Attorney, and Nintendo DS games like Another Code and Hotel Dusk as the biggest influences. While the "visual novel" school of Japanese adventures have become popular in the Western market, the traditional command-style adventure style is emulated far less often. The initial trailers and the demo however Detective Instinct, Farewell My Beloved were incredibly promising, offering great visuals invoking classic Japanese adventures from the late eighties ~ early 2000s and music, and teasing an interesting-sounding mystery. The game was finally released late November 2025, so how does the final product hold up?

To start off with the visuals and the audio: Detective Instinct, Farewell My Beloved is a must-see (and hear) for those who love the games I mentioned above. You can feel in everything how much the developers love games like Famicom Detective Club, Ace Attorney and Policenauts. The game features the familiar "command menu on one side of the screen" layout, though unlike Famicom Detective Club, it utilizes character art that is more animated, bringing them closer to the lively characters of Ace Attorney, with their personalities being perfectly conveyed through the player through the great animations. The artwork is really good, with also occasional cut-scene-esque stills that give the game a cinematic feel and the audio too features some great tunes that accompany your investigation into the missing woman. Detective Instinct, Farewell My Beloved feels right at home next to its direct inspirations and if you had told me this had been a game during that generation, I would probably have believed you right away. I honestly have no complaints in this regard.

Gameplay-wise, the game follows Famicom Detective Club more than Ace Attorney though. You advance through the story by using commands like "Talk" and "Check" to interact with other characters or the environment, and by talking with everyone, you gather more information which allows you to talk about *other* things to characters, slowly advancing the story. Fortunately, the game also takes inspiration from the more friendlier version of Famicom Detective Club, highlighting what commands you haven't used yet as an indicator of how to advance in the game. At the end of each chapter, the protagonist and Emma recap all the events that occured that day and the discoveries they made, resulting in a series of questions that are basically just testing your memory, though it occassionally also asks you to input names manually (instead of just choosing out of a list of options). This is a 'mechanic' also seen in games like Famicom Detective Club and Another Code, and as in those games, it's not really an engaging mechanic in any manner. There's no contradiction mechanic where you have to find discrepencies between statements and evidence or any of such interactive detective gameplay, so save for two or three puzzles, Detective Instinct plays very much like Famicom Detective Club, where you're just following the story.

The story however, is where I find the game not as engaging as its presentation. While it starts off with an interesting premise, a murder at a hotel and then a disappearance of a woman, the mystery plot is ultimately fairly short, and what I found most disappointing is that the more interesting twists and turns of the story, aren't part of your investigation. Once you're on the train, the focus of your investigation is on the missing woman (the question of whether she actually exists and if so, where she has gone to) and while you can probably guess it's somehow related to the hotel murder at the start of the game, I have to say the missing woman part of the mystery is by far the least interesting aspect of the plot. The how of how she was seemingly spirited away from the train is boringly simple, while the why might be better, but again, it's by far the least interesting part of the whole plot. So where does the player learn about the more interesting parts of the plot? Well, the other characters tell you about it! The minor advancements you make in your investigation for some reason always lead to characters revealing very important plot points regarding other characters set elsewhere, revealing an interesting scheme being worked out elsewhere, but you only hear about it because it's like almost everyone on the train knows a bit about that scheme, with Emma and the protagonist being the only ones who don't know a thing. But they only learn about it, because they just happen to be looking for a missing woman and each time they discover something regarding that mystery, characters start telling them also about the more interesting plot. So until the very end, I felt I was not investigating the more appealing parts of the plot and stuck with the least engaging parts of the mystery. 

Perhaps it's a matter of the scope of this game, as while it certainly punches above its weight in terms of graphics and style, I can imagine the developers were trying to limit the scope of the story a bit to keep the development of this game manageable. But to me, the story just lacked the twists and turns to keep me truly exciting to learn more about the mystery, while at the same time I could imagine me liking the story so much better if we had been investigating this case from a completely different angle, especially with these visuals. Due the smaller scope of the story, which also leads to a smaller cast of characters however, you get to spend more time with most of the characters (especially Emma), so that will probably please the players who enjoy these characters and want to learn more about what makes them tick, but mystery-wise, I can't deny I had hoped for much more.

By the way, while this game was written in English, I ended up playing it in Japanese because I first just wanted to see how it looked, but had overlooked the (very clear) message telling me that the save games for both languages are seperate: by the time I realized that, I had already advanced enough in my Japanese save I didn't want to start all over again. The translation is really good though and really makes you feel like you're playing an old Japanese adventure game. 

So on one hand, I really liked Detective Instinct, Farewell My Beloved for what it aims to do and in certain aspects, it not only succeeds greatly, but far greatly surpasses expectations, but on the other hand, I also think it's not as succesful as many of its inspiration in using the limited command-style gameplay to present a mystery story. Not all those games have interactive mystery gameplay like Ace Attorney, but can still present engaging tales of mystery via the kind of mystery they focus on, the way the twists and turns are presented to the player and by using foreshadowing/clewing, and that's where I feel Detective Instinct, Farewell My Beloved's presentation far outpaced the story. I am interested in seeing more of this studio though if they want to make more of these games.