Judge Dee: The City God Case (PS3)
Hidden object games are a perfect fit for systems with touchscreens or a mouse, the player easily able to search for the items and click or tap on them the moment they spot them. Since it is a niche genre that seems mostly embraced by casual gamers who already primarily use systems with such features, there’s really no reason to branch outside of the platforms that suit it best, but I was intrigued to learn the PlayStation 3 had one in the form of Judge Dee: The City God Case. Using control sticks and buttons to control the action, things would always be a little slower and less precise, but even allowing for this inevitable awkwardness, Judge Dee: The City God Case is a deeply flawed game where the controls are barely part of the problem.
While there are many forms of play in this title, the hidden object puzzles are one of the most frequent forms of play and yet they are constructed in such an unfriendly and unenjoyable way. To start, the hidden object puzzles are actually integrated into the medieval Chinese city you’ll be exploring as you solve the mystery hanging over the game, and while having the usually chaotic and item-filled screens used for hidden object puzzles actually blend into the world realistically sounds nice on paper, it manifests in a way that hinders the actual puzzles. Since an area is meant to pass for part of a temple or palace, it can’t be in such a state of disarray that it looks like the owners are slobs. To get around the fact it can’t make an item rich puzzle, Judge Dee: The City God Case resorts to unfortunate tactics. You might need to find something that is long and thin, but the majority of the items will be hidden behind something, meaning that you will sometimes have to hope that the piece of an object you can’t see lines up with the required item on your list. Unfortunately, that list doesn’t actually have words telling you what to look for, but instead darkened silhouettes, and this complicates things even further.
Many times in the hidden object puzzles you might be given a dark black oval as something to search for and notice that many items fit that description. Since some objects might be ovals but you can’t see their entire shape this can make things even more muddy on what the game is asking for, and things can get really frustrating when the important part of an item is actually hidden from view. The long and thin objects can have a distinct point on the end only for that to not show in the actual hidden object screen, so absolutely vital information is deliberately obfuscated to make things more challenging. Technically you won’t lose if you click all over the place, only missing out on points, but the appeal of this form of puzzle is finding something that was cleverly hidden in the background, and the game’s objects are often either easy to spot or hard only because the game has decided to hide them so well you might not even realize what the object is meant to be. There are hints that are meant to highlight objects for you but it’s quick and easy to miss if you aren’t looking in the right area, but perhaps the worst sin of all is that the darkened silhouettes of objects you’re meant to find don’t always line up perfectly. One memorable instance involved needing to find a rat symbol in the Temple, and while there was a rat symbol front and center, its tail and pose were different than the silhouette on the item list. However, it was the correct item to click, while at other parts the game expects you to notice the smallest bump in the dark shape on your list that makes a certain oval stand out from all of the other oval-shaped objects in the puzzle.
Naturally, having the PS3 controller involved in all of this exacerbates things some. The control sticks can’t quite as carefully move your cursor around as a mouse when trying to select objects. Even a little force will move it a little bit along rather than just a smidge, and this can definitely became a problem since the items must be clicked on precisely. Even the incredibly thin items, even the ones where only a small portion of them is poking out from behind something, all have a click region that matches their shape exactly. Clicking a tiny bit next to them doesn’t lead to the game recognizing you found the object, and this can lead to the player thinking they simply clicked the wrong object and wasting time looking for it elsewhere. While all the hidden object screens look very nice because they are simply repurposed versions of the game’s detailed backgrounds, searching them has very little appeal because of how poorly the process is handled both in concept and control.
Cursor problems do extend elsewhere in Judge Dee: The City God Case in a very strange way. As you navigate the town, there are people to talk to, items to pick up, and puzzles to activate. You move from screen to screen and can click on certain regions of it to interact with points of interest, and while your cursor will change if you move over one, there is an odd glitch. After completing a puzzle in an area, the ability to click around remains but the menu to do the puzzles won’t appear when clicked. You need to click elsewhere to dismiss the menu that didn’t open so you can click on other things, and while this issue disappears if you leave the screen and return, the puzzle area can sometimes include items you need to pick up. Picking up items in general is flawed, there being many points where you need the right items to proceed or to open up a puzzle or door. Problem is, these items do little to stick out in areas, especially since the hidden object puzzles built out of an area’s background already lead to a small but reasonable spread of clutter. Even realizing the item is important can be difficult, and if you reach a point where something you don’t have is required, it can involve moving your cursor around various screens in the hopes you’ll finally find the specific out of place item that is necessary for progress.
Outside of the hidden object puzzles there are plenty of less prevalent puzzle types that appear during the adventure for the sake of variety. These are more of a mixed bag, some working well, others a little sloppy, and some outright aggravating thanks to poor design choices. One memorably awful one comes from the game’s set of riddles, these usually about placing items in the correct slots on a wheel. This can include logic puzzles for placing the Chinese Zodiac animals properly which works well enough, but the gemstone puzzle does not tell you the gemstones in play. The game asks you to guess at what it considers a certain type of gem, and the coloration and cut aren’t always what one would consider standard for such a jewel. Since coloration and even an unnoticeable transparency are vital clues here, the fact the game can’t even make decent distinctions between them makes this puzzle harder than it should be. Challenging riddles can be fun, but only if your means for solving them fits the words laid out for you.
Near the middle of the road when it comes to alternate puzzle types are the Memory matching puzzles that don’t even have an external pressure to make them anything more than a foregone conclusion, locks where you need to move pieces around in a grid to help a trapped piece escape, and tangrams where you need to make pictures out of a set of shapes. The shapes for the tangrams don’t lock in place and need to avoid overlapping despite the control stick’s not being very precise, but the puzzle concept is still done about as well as it could be. The puzzle piece jumble is simple and a bit slow but not a badly done idea, but then we head into the game’s two forms of board game puzzles.
If you want hints and don’t want to accumulate them naturally with your growing score and actions during the plot, you can find a man who will set up a Go puzzle you get a few tries at solving. Rather then this token flipping game about surrounding pieces to claim them being about trying to win though, these can sometimes just be a challenge with a quirky name that you somehow have to make manifest on the board. The game isn’t really long enough for this to crop up enough to become interesting, but this optional way to earn tokens can at least be brushed aside if it’s not to your tastes. Popping up during the main plot is Dou Shou Qi, a game sometimes called Animal Chess and similar in concept to Stratego in that pieces claim each other based on their rank and can perform specific special actions on the board. However, after the game goes through the trouble of teaching you the rules, you don’t play Dou Shou Qi so much as get asked which piece should be moved next on a board to lead to an eventual victory. Your options are always limited and you can brute force it too easily because of it, this chance to play a nifty board game turned into a lifeless and all too easily circumvented challenge.
Judge Dee: The City God Case fails at so much of what makes it a game that it can’t even hit the low bar of providing simple yet enjoyable hidden object puzzles, but there is a bright light amidst this mess of poorly done puzzles. Judge Dee is a serious and professional magistrate based on a real man that serves as a detective in a series of novels by a man named Robert van Gulk. In this game, Judge Dee’s investigation finds him in a Chinese city where a plague seems to be spreading through the townsfolk, the mayor calling for help once her own son comes down with the disease. The people believe this plague to be the work of a vengeful city god who has cursed those who displease him, but Judge Dee and his two retainers find there is far more going on in this little city as they question people and investigate suspicious areas around town.
Judge Dee’s investigative method has the same stylish reveals a Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot story might have where the detective keeps his revelations and special knowledge close to his chest until it is a suitably dramatic time to reveal things, even gathering people together for the reveal at the end of the case. When Judge Dee wants to gain an edge in an interrogation he tends to bring up a detail he’s gleaned from the events so far that he made no mention of previously, and the mystery of the City God’s curse has enough twists and turns to make for an interesting through line. Perhaps one of the best parts of the game though are the gorgeous still paintings used to connect the game’s chapters, these illustrations meant to evoke the kind of paintings appropriate to the time period. Characters are distinct and detailed on backgrounds where the paper creates most of the environmental space with often the hint of a color informing an object rather than a fully filled outline, such a stylish approach to conveying its more important story beats unfortunately wasted on a game that only gets its plot right. You can technically skip through many of the puzzles with little penalty, but the required ones and inventory woes would still be required to see these wonderful works of art or finding out the answer to the mystery, and sadly neither is so stupendous that it makes even that level of irritation worth it.
THE VERDICT: With its between chapter art hearkening back to medieval Chinese paintings and an intriguing mystery to guide the story along, Judge Dee: The City God Case could have been a stylish hidden object game with a plot worth paying attention to. However, it fails at almost every form of interaction it includes. Hidden object puzzles have an awful system for knowing what you need to find and items are placed in deceptive ways that require guesswork, board game puzzles go for an unusual route that makes their demands confusing, and finding vital inventory items around the city can be guesswork that isn’t helped by the imprecise PS3 controls and minor glitches. You can skip some of the bad puzzles and others are acceptably designed, but it’s hard to care about the investigation when every step of it can lead to irritation and unfair design.
And so, I give Judge Dee: The City God Case for PlayStation 3…
A TERRIBLE rating. If not for the good mystery at its heart and some of its artistic presentation, this would definitely rank among the worst hidden object games. Letting you skip so much of the bothersome parts means you can technically trim this down to a game that is awful far less often, but those item searches are still present and have so many flaws that it feels like they were implemented without any thoughts on how they’d interact with each other. The shape-based list is going to be problematic if you can’t see every part of the object, especially when the visible parts might not even give you a good clue of what the full item looks like. Hiding them at all is a recipe for trouble if you are going to obfuscate the most distinct parts of the object, and while doing it in service of trying to make the usually impossible item arrangements of a hidden object puzzle gel with the world design is admirable, it’s an artistic decision that sits poorly with every other aspect of this gameplay style. The different puzzles like the lock sliders and tangrams are simply too plain to make up for the flaws at the core, and having inventory puzzles depend on the player picking up unexceptional items in a cluttered area just makes even the basic plot progression annoying at parts. Judge Dee and the medieval Chinese setting could have done so much to spice up this puzzle heavy game, but instead they’re barely able to hang in there as the puzzles are constantly dragging it down or immediately fading from memory due to their simplicity or underfed concepts.
The PS3 controller is practically irrelevant to the game’s rating despite its issues. Even on PC you’d hit snags like the silhouette problems, but the control sticks do make everything a touch more annoying. Clicking on something should have been more lenient if the game was going to be ported to a console at all, but they’re hardly this game’s downfall. Judge Dee: The City God Case tried to be too different, adding a layer of challenge to the puzzles that isn’t compatible with how things actually unfold during play. It could have been a beautiful member of its niche subgenre, but its artistry is sullied by being attached to some truly flawed puzzle designs.