Inspector Waffles Early Days

I try to be fair here. Early Days is the story prequel to the Inspector Waffles, which is great if you played and liked the first game. The Gameboy-ish pixelstyle is a strange but nice approach and it works out. But the art-style have not been great executed and comes with some flaws... The dialog font, is not good the read. Too thin, too wide spaces and sometimes with a glitch. There are so many examples of much better Gameboy fonts from the 90s original games. The overall character design is - to be honest - really not great. The cat inspector does not look like a cat in the game, even worse it's has more of a rat. And since all cats look alike, it's hard to tell which is which in the game. Why not spending more time on a proper character art? Again, games from the 90s did this already much better! So, if you choose to mimic this style, please be consequential and don't repeat mistakes from the past. The 8-Bit music is ok. It blends in, but nothing that sticks with you forever. The game itself and the puzzles are fun. Not particular hard, although finding "Mad Catter" during playthrough can be challenging. Took me 6-8 relaxed hours to complete. The price is fair, so you may consider supporting this indie dev. I really like to see their next game and their development for sure.

Lighthearted, the handheld console aesthetic and gameplay caught me off guard at first but I quickly grew fond of it, really enjoying the dialogues and the puzzles with their jokes

Pretty good game with decent puzzles. Styling a prequel after games from an older era was an interesting design choice. The mechanics work well, although personally I'd probably prefer the point and click style of the first game. One thing I didn't like is the save system. It's okay for the most part, but the automatic save after solving a case overwrites an existing save for the case, thus forcing you to re-play the entire case if you missed something, like a Mad Catter puzzle. Also, on my second playthrough (for the Mad Catter puzzles) the arcade game in case 4 bugged out on me. Pressing start after inserting the coin immediately took me out of the minigame.