I just stumbled upon the Escapist's review of Emerald City Confidential.
To sum it up, it appears to be an 2009 adventure game set in the Land of Oz (yes, think Dorothy) with a significant dose of film noir feeling. The puzzles dont seem to be very hard, which may be a good or a bad point depending on your tastes, but most importantly the story and characters are getting praised quite high.
Now, just reading the review has summoned memories of The Longest Journey or Discworld Noir, so I guess I'll be trying that game at some point, but.. has anyone played it already? What do you seasoned adventure vets think of it ?

I started playing it, but got sidetracked by something else. I'll get back to it, though. It seems fun so far, with an interesting mystery and characters. But it also seems very "casual". You get stupid congratulations-messages for every little thing you do, and the puzzles have so far been extremely easy.

It certainly sounds interesting, I love noir so I'll have to give this a bash. Good find.

I've seen it quite a few times around the web. Looks like a great game, just have so many other games to get through right now.

it is not The Wiz so I have no interest. Motown makes my soul sing!

Looks nice, but I don't know much about it.

There's a nice review here:

Emerald City and Oz.
It made be think about something else:
[url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oz_(TV_series]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oz_(TV_series[/url])
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118421/
You would have a lot of murder mysteries to solve there.

It *is* a so-called casual game (and I despise that label). You can get a 1 hour timed demo of it from several of the game portals such as Big Fish Games or Spintop Games.

I've played it more now, and it does have some interesting puzzles and clever situations. They're mostly fairly easy, but still quite fun. Also, the story does get pretty good.
Yeah, it's quite casual, but I still think most adventure gamers will like it.