Loco Motive review – a succulent point-and-click adventure let down by a lackluster mystery

Loco Motive is one of those games that is very easy to enjoy and feels like you're having a good time playing it. A point-and-click adventure in the vein of old LucasArts games, this is a funny and superbly animated adventure through a 1930s Orient Express that delights in almost every moment. It's essentially a murder mystery, although it's not afraid to laugh at its own expense and use the same kind of silly puzzle logic as Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle did it before. There are so many things I love about this movie, so why did I feel more and more indifferent by the time I reached the end credits?

I suspect part of that has to do with its underlying mystery, which mostly boils down to a fairly rudimentary will dispute, a bit of tax evasion and not much else. Inheritance squabbles aren't the most scintillating subject at the best of times, and there's only limited comic mileage that developer Robust Games manages to squeeze out of jokes about tax evasion and empty coffers , as one would expect (although, to his credit, what he manages to come out of this rather dry subject is generally very good and earned more than a few smiles from me). More broadly, though, it's also the kind of setup that makes it easy to predict who its main villains and suspects will be. Puns aside, there's nothing “loco” about anyone's motivations here, and when the big reveal finally comes, it's the kind of inevitable shrug you've seen arriving a mile and a half into the middle of act two.

It's a shame, especially when Loco Motive starts off so strong. Set in and around the murder of the wealthy Lady Unterwald – who mysteriously dropped dead while reading her own highly anticipated and constantly updated will aboard a steam express train – you first take control of her paperwork-loving estate attorney, Arthur Ackerman. As this bumbling giant with a heart of gold is given the role of a makeshift detective, he makes for a very affable lead as you get to grips with the game's item-based puzzles.

In this classic adventure game mold, Loco Motive is all about applying the correct shaped object to a given problem, occasionally grabbing and combining objects from your Tardis-like jacket pocket to create new and more gadgets and more stupid to get around the problem in question. Most of the solutions are pretty obvious, although some definitely stray into that “one leap of logic too far” bucket that will have you tearing your hair out or repeatedly rushing to the built-in advice phone to help you work out these missing connections. Some puzzle objects can also come from all sorts of unlikely places, requiring careful interrogation of your surroundings to extract exactly what you need.

Indeed, with a few tidbits or nuggets of information often lying behind several interlocking lines of dialogue, Loco Motive takes this opportunity to bring its witty storyline to the forefront. The genuinely funny writing does a lot of work here, elevating its actors to feel like they've all been taken straight from the pages of an Agatha Christie novel. From rich widows and dim-witted sons to sleazy crooks, cunning accountants and over-stressed bosses to name just a few of the passengers you'll encounter here, almost every character in Loco Motive is extremely hardworking. hard to entertain you. . Every line is beautifully voiced, with even the most minor characters receiving characterful and endearing performances from their respective voice actors – although after a few hours of deep digging, the appeal of such wordy text definitely began to exhaust himself a little for me. I quickly stopped searching for these additional lines, limiting my inquiries to the topic at hand rather than choosing to spend more time in their business.

The construction of the game's individual puzzle arcs is also almost too neat for its own good. The focus in solving them is always directly on how items and events relate to the next link in the current puzzle chain, not on the how and why of which actually isn't. As a result, the murder itself ends up taking a back seat, which is perhaps why the eventual climax falls so flat. Your motivation for helping these characters is never really to find Lady Unterwald's killer, but simply to see what the next fun solution to a puzzle might be. Additionally, Loco Motive has a nasty habit of wrapping up a character's story as soon as their puzzle arc is complete, thereby excluding them as potential suspects and thereby reducing its pool of potential murders even further.

There's a pretty good attempt at playing with the overall timeline of the murder to add new details and layers of intrigue, as once Arthur's story is complete, the torch is passed to not one, but two additional protagonists. First up is the somewhat more annoying detective novelist Herman Merman, whose grating cries of “No!” » and “It doesn’t work!” with each incorrect puzzle attempt, it makes it look infinitely worse in comparison. Its storyline sheds new light on the events leading up to Lady Unterwald's murder, but once again the game does such a good job of picking up on all the plot threads it introduces here that it only remains almost nothing left for its third and final protagonist – the secret agent of the Inland Revenue. Diana Osterhagen – to actually investigate. Indeed, her narrative arc seems particularly truncated compared to her male counterparts, which is disappointing when she's much more fun to be around than the interminable Herman.

But while Diana's act may be a bit rushed in its own right, Loco Motive barely manages to pull it off for a great final puzzle that makes excellent use of all three leads. Again, though, it's the cerebral bits that stick in the memory here rather than the nuts and bolts of the main mystery, which for some might just be enough. For me, it's this tight marriage between intrigue and puzzles that makes it a really good detective game in my books, and Loco Motive never quite gets the balance right. It's a perfectly enjoyable way to spend six to eight hours, but after the thrilling ingenuity of more recent murder mystery games, such as The rise of the golden idolLoco Motive ultimately seems a little flat in comparison. That said, I'm dying to see what Robust Games does next, because this studio has an obvious passion for point-and-click games, and it's already mastered the sense of humor that really makes them sing. If he can connect these dots to some sort of meatier mystery story, I suspect their next game could be absolutely killer.

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