Game: Detective Case and Clown Bot in: Murder in The Hotel Lisbon
Genre: Adventure | Puzzle | Lifestyle
System: Nintendo Switch (Also on Steam)
Developers | Publishers: Nerd Monkeys
Age Rating: EU 16 | US T
Price: EU €16,34 | USD $9.99 | UK £9.99
Release Date: September 30th 2020
Review code used, with many thanks to Nerd Monkeys
Detective Case and Clown Bot: Murder in the Hotel Lisbon, is a 2D point-and-click comic adventure from Portuguese developer Nerd Monkeys. In the Hotel Lisbon, a man committed suicide with 14 stabs to the back while at the same time he peacefully drank his coffee. This case with contradictory facts, mixed with the ineptitude of the local police department means that it can only be solved by the amazing Detective Case and his sidekick Clown Bot.
Case and Clown Bot
Detective Justin Case who, like any good shoestring detective starts his adventure, wakes up in a foggy haze of alcoholic regrets has just recovered from a questionable night out on the town. He finds he has inherited a Domestic Robot 9000 who tells extremely bad jokes. Despite being made to function as a domestic droid, the robot tells the detective that it desires to become a circus clown instead. Heeding to the robot’s own calling, the illustrious detective decides to name it Clown Bot.
Clown Bot joins a reluctant Case as his sidekick and comes in useful as he has an octopus inside him that acts as your inventory. Okay, I thought that’s not at all weird to have a robot with an octopus inside it. Moving on!
Silhouette Audience
As chapter one starts it’s accompanied by raucous applause of a silhouetted audience in the foreground as the curtain draws back to reveal Act One, giving the impression its a comedy stage show setting, bad jokes included. After every joke is told the audience pops up accompanied by tin-canned laughter, but more on the bad jokes shortly!
Detective Case and Clown Bot plays like a standard point and click game. You search a few different locations for clues, such as the Hotel Lisbon and the local police station via several streets connected to each other by a pavement. Pointing and clicking at anything that looks suspicious and gathering evidence is the way to go. A fast-travel feature is also present, in the form of a taxi service that Clown Bot can call. You can even call the taxis service indoors and it will magically drive through the building’s walls to collect Case and Clown Bot. Nothing weird about that either!
Interrogate Suspects
After gathering your evidence you then have to interrogate suspects as Detective Case or Clown Bot by making three accusations. You have to choose the accusations from a small list and then match that up to the evidence. One choice is obviously wrong and unrelated to evidence and the others are related to the evidence you’ve collected. However, sometimes the wording of the “right” accusation to make can seem strange. The suspect seem to get angry when I insult them, but all of the choices read as insulting!
The other major issue with interviewing is that sometimes suspects will only crack when they are being interrogated by Clown Bot or Detective Case, so even if you get all your questions right you might have to redo the whole interview again with the other character. If you have been paying attention to the story you won’t find any of the interrogations to be overly challenging either.
Clicking on a character or an object with whom Case can interact brings up an icon menu for the available actions, such as to examine (an eyeball), to talk (a mouth), or to use (a hand). In addition, clicking on Clown Bot brings up different icons, such as a file cabinet icon to access the inventory, and a red button to have the robot tell a joke.
Questionable Humour
They say humour is subjective to each individual, and that’s maybe just as well when it comes to Detective Case and Clown Bot. I’ve got a pretty broad sense of humour but I found that most of the “jokes” aren’t funny, corny maybe, but funny? No! Some of the jokes are self-aware, either directed toward some other subject or openly directed with references to other adventure games and franchises.
Then there are jokes which don’t come across right, this might be due to the translation from the original Portuguese into English. There are some jokes that make for some very uncomfortable reading as they are sexist, homophobic, and basically downright offensive!
At first, I was taken aback by some of the writing in this game, at one stage I showed the game to my partner and asked, “Am I reading this right”? And it was confirmed I was reading it correctly.
Having thought about it for a few days, I come up with this as a theory for the off-colour humour. With the inclusion of this type of so-called humour in the game the developers could be trying to give the impression that the characters in the game are ignorant and prejudiced, which includes both Case and Clown Bot. At least I hope that is the intention as otherwise the developers would need to examine their biased views on the world. This is definitely a game that is not suitable for younger gamers, in fact there where times when I felt it was a chore to play due to the humour or the lack thereof.
Repetitive Backtracking
I thought the pacing of the game was a little slow. Detective Case moving around felt quite clunky and there is so much back and forth along the street connected by one long pavement, since there are very few actual locations in the game. It gets very repetitive moving along the street.
As Case is walking along the street, silhouetted traffic occasionally passes by in the foreground in the shape of cars and even large trolleybuses. It’s a nice touch at the start of the game but eventually, it wears thin as the silhouettes interfere with your view of some of the speech bubbles. There are also a few instances of the speech bubbles over lapping the characters icons when they are talking, so you can’t see the text properly.
Visuals and Controls
The game’s graphics reminded me of the early days of adventure gaming, similar to the pixel art style of classic adventure games from LucasArts, such as Sam and Max: Hit the Road, though less pixelated and with a slightly cleaner definition.
All dialogue is written, with no voice-over and sound is mainly in the form of music of jazzy style and reflective of the noir tone of classic detective films. It’s a repeating score which changes slightly depending on the location or situation along with a few sound effects.
Controls feel clunky as I’ve mentioned but otherwise the game ran smoothly without any frame rate Issues.
Conclusion
Overall Detective Case and Clown Bot in: Murder in The Hotel Lisbon is passable as a point and click game. The risqué humour that can range from silly to controversial would be a matter of choice on the players part, provided they find it acceptable in this day and age!
As for myself, you may have gathered by now I did not like the humour in the game. So my score for Detective Case and Clown Bot in: Murder in The Hotel Lisbon is..
Final Verdict: I’m Not Sure
Footnote:
Since the publication of this review, the developers, Nerd Monkeys and I have been having a chat through email.
I felt it was fair to the developers to add a couple of paragraphs from their email as a footnote to this review. After all, writers can voice their opinions about a developers game in a review. But seldom do the developers get to voice their opinion on what a writer has written in a review about their game. It should be noted that Nerd Monkeys have not influenced my decision to add their words as a footnote in any way! I have also asked their permission to use their words. Neither has it changed my score of the game, which is a neutral score of I’m Not Sure. I just wanted to let the developers’ voice be heard!
Nerd Monkeys,
“Some things are indeed lost in translation, others like the trolley passing in front of the speech bubble were actually representing the ruckus it does IRL and how it’s impossible to hear anyone nearby, clearly it’s something that doesn’t communicate well to the players and it’s just annoying, others are plain bugs.
Regarding the humour, you hit the nail on this one, their ignorance and Clown Bot’s naivety is represented with a lot of tropes from 80’s comedy movies and tv shows that nowadays would never, ever, pass. Making a game set in the 80s with this type of script sometimes had me grind my teeth during production because it is definitely it’s own thing, and humour (good or bad) is a very thin line and it’s easy to cross it.”