Cynical private eye Nick Bounty leaps from cheap film to PC in his first mini-mystery adventure, “A Case of the Crabs.” Mark Darin designed this film-noir mystery, which starts out rather promisingly with the classic type of line, “It was a cold Thursday in January …” and proceeds to show us how a shellfish salesman drops dead at Nick’s office door. It’s a good hook to begin a game, but I’m afraid that the game only goes downhill from here.

CRAB GOT YOUR TONGUE?

The voice acting in this game is what I would call sketchy. Nick Bounty might say, “It SUCKS!” or “Dammit to hell!” However, there is a much nicer variety of words to use that aren’t so vague, such as “mediocre” and “timid.” The opening lines are done very well, but a lot of the lines after that are either rushed, sloppy, or just plain BAD. I appreciate humor in a game, but nothing that was intentionally funny in this game made me laugh. Bounty proves to be a man with a lack of a useful vocabulary, much like a TV news anchor. Everything is observed as “Sweeeet!” or “Niiiiice!” Could we try a bit harder with those lines next time, dude?

The other sounds consisted mainly of classic 30s jazz music (a la Harold Faltermeyer) that was consistently well done.

EYE FOR CRIME

Characters were a bit on the slipshod side, looking more like cartoons at points than anything else. They all suffered from ADD, if you watched closely. Some of them hallucinated, some of them looked asleep while you were talking to them, others looked dazed and confused. The waitress at the Blue Crab Diner couldn’t contain herself from doing the chicken dance; she had her head and hands bobbing throughout our conversations. Other graphics were very attractive, even if everything was in black and white. Now I understand why they created a Technicolor version of “Singin’ in the Rain.”

The interface was pretty basic – you had your usual ‘Get,’ ‘Shoot,’ ‘Move,’ etc. type buttons and then a small inventory. Nothing too fancy, but it worked smoothly and I had no problems with it.

HOOK, LINE, AND SINKER

The puzzles, if you knew what you were doing, were easy. Otherwise, they were sort of random – combining inventory items always seemed the way to go, but there were some items that you could pick up that you would never think of picking up in real life – i.e. fizzled-out wire, or a crab, for that matter. Some of the puzzles involved using a combined item on something else, while others were more, “Hey, let’s try this just for the hell of it.” For example, one puzzle requires you to use a knife on a book. Unless we were part of some Orthodox religion, I doubt cutting up a book into a leaflet would be at the top of our ‘To Do’ list.

A sequel would be most welcome if a bit more time was put in to making those final touches – for an independent developer, I really did enjoy this game (considering it takes no more than an hour or so to play), but was slightly disappointed at some aspects, and wondered if the developer was hurrying to meet a deadline instead of taking his time and going through each step. As wonderful a gaming experience as this was, I’d have enjoyed it better had things been cleaned up a little – if he had played through the game by himself, he probably would have realized some of the little quirks therein. Overall, this was still a wonderful effort and I’m sure that many mystery fans will look into this game as I did.

Final Grade: C+

A Case of the Crabs is part of Just Adventure Independent Developers and can be downloaded and played here.

System Requirements:

• PC or Mac with an Internet browser that supports Macromedia Flash