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 makes you feel like you are having a great time while playing it. A point-and-click adventure reminiscent of old LucasArts games, this is a fun, beautifully animated game set aboard the 1930s Orient Express that delights at almost every turn. It’s a murder mystery at its core, albeit one that’s not afraid to laugh at its own expense and uses the same ridiculous puzzle logic as Monkey Island and Monkey Island. Tentacle Day did before that. There are so many things I liked about it, so why did I feel increasingly indifferent towards it as the credits rolled?

I suspect some of this is due to the underlying mystery; This is mostly due to a fairly simple will dispute, a little bit of tax evasion and not much else. Inheritance fights aren’t the most glamorous of plots at the best of times, and there’s only so much comedy mileage that developer Robust Games manages to get out of jokes about tax evasion and predictably empty crates (though to its credit, what manages to do) Getting through this rather dry subject matter is routine is very good and got more than a few smiles from me). But more broadly, it’s also the kind of fiction that makes it easy to guess who the biggest villains and suspects will be. Train pun aside, there’s nothing ‘crazy’ about anyone’s motives here, and when the big reveal finally arrives, it’s the sort of inevitable shrug you see coming a mile away in the middle of the second act.

It’s a shame that Loco Motive in particular is off to such a strong start. You first take control of Arthur Ackerman, an estate lawyer with a penchant for her paperwork, in and around the murder of wealthy Lady Unterwald, who mysteriously falls to her death while reading her own highly anticipated and constantly updated will on a steam-powered express train. This bumbling giant with a heart of gold takes on the role of makeshift detective, providing gentle leadership as you begin to solve the game’s item-based puzzles.

In this classic adventure game mould, Loco Motive is all about applying the right shaped element to any problem, taking items from your Tardis-like coat pocket and occasionally combining them to create new and increasingly ridiculous gadgets to solve the problem at hand. Most of the solutions are pretty obvious, but some definitely veer into the ‘one step too far in logic’ bucket that will have you tearing your hair out or running repeatedly to the phone of built-in clues to help you make the missing connections. Some puzzle objects may also come from unexpected places, requiring careful interrogation of your environment to determine exactly what you need.

In fact, since several intertwined lines of dialogue often have some element or snippet of information behind them, Loco Motive uses this opportunity to put its witty script front and center. The genuinely funny writing does a lot of the heavy lifting here, elevating the cast so that it all feels like it’s been ripped straight from the pages of an Agatha Christie novel. From cranky rich widows and foolish sons to petty hustlers, slick accountants and overstressed chefs, these are just some of the travelers you’ll rub shoulders with here; Almost every character in Loco Motive works extremely hard to entertain you. . Every line is beautifully voiced, with even the most minor characters getting characterful and likeable performances from their respective voice actors – but after a few hours of thorough digging, the appeal of such detailed and delicious text was definitely starting to wear a little thin for me. I quickly stopped searching for those extra lines, keeping my questions relevant to the topic at hand, preferring to spend more time in their presence.

The structure of the game’s individual puzzle arcs is also almost too neat for its own good. The emphasis on solving them is always on how the elements and events directly relate to the next link in the ongoing puzzle chain, rather than on the hows and whys of who really doesn’t know. As a result, the murder itself is relegated to the background, which is perhaps why the final climax feels so flat. Your motivation for helping these characters is never to find Lady Unterwald’s killer, but simply to see what the next hilarious puzzle solution might be. Furthermore, Loco Motive has an increasingly worse habit of wrapping up a character’s story as soon as the puzzle sequence is completed, effectively ruling them out as potential suspects and thus narrowing the potential murder pool even further.

There’s a pretty good attempt to play with the overarching timeline of the murder to add new details and layers of intrigue, with the torch being passed to not one but two more heroes once Arthur’s story is complete. The first of these, the more strenuous one, is that of the detective novelist Herman Merman: “No!” was shouting. and “This doesn’t work!” Every wrong puzzle attempt puts him in a much worse situation. His story sheds new light on the events leading up to Lady Unterwald’s murder, but once again, the game does such a good job writing out the loose plot threads it introduces here that there’s almost nothing left for its third and final protagonist, an Inland Revenue secret agent. Diana Osterhagen – to really dig. In fact, her story arc seems particularly half-baked compared to her male counterparts; This is disappointing because it’s so much more fun than hanging out with Herman endlessly.

But while Diana’s action is perhaps a bit rushed in itself, Loco Motive almost manages to pull it back for a great puzzle finale that makes excellent use of all three heroes. What sticks in the memory here, though, are the cerebral set pieces that may be enough for some, rather than the nuts and bolts of the main mystery. For me, it’s the tight marriage between plot and puzzles that makes a truly great detective game in my books, and Loco Motive never quite strikes the right balance. It’s a hugely enjoyable way to spend six to eight hours, but after the exciting ingenuity of newer murder mystery games, Rise of the Golden IdolLoco Motive ultimately feels a bit flat by comparison. With all that said, I can’t wait to see what Robust Games does next, because this studio has a clear passion for point-and-click games, and the sense of humor that really makes them sing has already been nailed. If they can connect these dots with a more comprehensive mystery story, I suspect their next game could be absolutely amazing.

A copy of Loco Motive was provided for review by publisher Chucklefish.