Crescent Bay: Instant murder mystery

(Full disclosure: I am a Humble Partner and this is a Humble Original)

I chose to download Crescent Bay a few months back on a whim, it seemed like an interesting bit of software that would properly not have been made without the presence of Humble, in fact it is unlikely anyone would have published it because while it does try to do something new it....well let’s move on....

Crescent Bay tells the story of a young man being drawn to his friend’s house for an inexplicable reason, after getting invited in by a spooky door he finds himself at the scene of a brutal murder and it is up to him to uncover the killer and what happened. This game is short, as in very, very short. As in; it can be finished under an hour. That in of itself is not a bad thing per say but the story is not that good, the opening is very exposition heavy from the very moment you click start and as a result is hard to get invested when you are trying to process a lot of philosophical clap trap in a monotone voice. The ending itself is a great anticlimax and a deep sense being unfulfilled, as if I was playing a prologue to a game that is not there or is just getting started. I really do not remember anything of Crescent Bay or what it is about story wise, it is just an aggressively mediocre plot that really should have been longer or paced better.

The door...

Starting Crescent Bay you would be mistaken in thinking it is walking simulator at least that is what I feared when I found myself experiencing the stirring interactive stimulation of pressing W to move forward while exposition was warbled at me. However once getting inside I had to solve the murder by linking the sequence of events by writing down clues in the right order. All of this is not very well explained and kind of dumped on you with very little tutorial, the gameplay itself is not bad and it does trust you to deduce clues without too much input but at the same time it is not very compelling, it feels like an obligation, a thing to exist for there to be a video game. The puzzles themselves are not particularly difficult and again can be solved with basic logic. It is fine, it serves it’s purpose and nothing else.

The game does not look the best from either graphics or really art style, most of it is just assists that while do fit in the world do not really stand out as anything special, it is perfectly ordinary.

I have heard that the game is very buggy, some have even encountered game breaking glitches, I however was lucky. I only got stuck on a chair but that is all, it ran well most of the time.

I am sorry that this is one of the shorter ones but I cannot really find much to talk about with Crescent Bay, It is just a bland experiment that does not waste time but does not really offer much subsidence.