Unheard - Voices of Crime

I did not know what to expect from the game and the description was confusing to me but I noticed pretty fast that I made the right decision to buy it. If there ever was a game I would compare this with it would be "The Return of the Obra Dinn". This game is a bit more easy than Obra Dinn but imo not less fun. You are a detective and the game consists of 5 cases (+DLC case) you'll have to solve. In each case you will get represented a map with different rooms and people (represented as circles) in it. You don't know who is who and you can only place your cursor in one room at a time to play the recording (around 15-20 minutes per map) to hear what's been said and done in this room. You can change rooms whenever you like and you can also rewind, fast forward and restart the record. This way you are trying to gather information to find out who is who (you'll have a list with names to chose from for each map) and what the story is all about so that you can answer the final question(s) that are different for each map. To help you finding crucial events you can mark certain events on the record. What makes the game so much fun is that the game is trying to trick the player multiple times so that you will draw the wrong conclusion the moment you are missing certain information so be sure that you witnessed everything you could and that you have listened to every detail very closely. You don't need good reflexes and you don't need to be Sherlock Holmes, you do however need some logical thinking and because of the missing subtitles understanding of the spoken language (English, Chinese, Japanese). English is not my native tongue but imo the voice over is pretty good understandable. Sometimes the (English) voice over seems to be a bit overdramatic but the actors clearly had fun doing them and for me it added to the feeling of puzzling together some mini mystery/crime movies. Highly recommended and I really hope there will be a sequel or some other DLCs sometime.

After watching the trailer, I decided to take the plunge and what I got was a 5 hour "listen em up" psudo "interweaving" narrative with a foreshadowed but still kinda weird twist ending I'd say really wasn't required. I bought it for a sound based detective game that was "open ended" as the writeup says, its not, each case has 2 or more questions posed and an end of case cinematic that highlight each "clue" in the dialogue. If you guess wrong, the game tells you how many you're correct with and sends you back to the start of the recording to listen and try again, each only has *one* correct answer. During my time with the game, my only real gripes are: Reaching the end of the timeline, the game pops up a screen to say "You reached the end, click the button to restart" instead of simply pausing till I scrub back. The game lacks any form of subtitles outside of the "end of case" cinematics. During play I always felt like I should have been able to zoom and pan the map to a degree (its locked in place) Stand out features are of course, the voice acting and the sound system the game uses, theres a faint echo and voices will play from the angle the speaker is to where "you" are, as you control a little blueprint man and right click to move around, room to room and follow speakers through each scene, moving your person to the speakers exact location makes their audio stereo. I cant say if having 5 or 7.1 audio makes a difference as i use stereo headphones but each characters voice acting was great quality and cast well, even the few characters that sound like they are over exagerating accents or cadence still fit with the overall feel (or rather sound!) of the game. Given there are only 5 real cases, including the Lethal script DLC case (Case 1: Twins doesnt really count, its a tutorial) there is a decent amount of content here for the price, if the devs make a sequel or more DLC, I would check it out as whats here makes me wish there was more.

"I take it you've read the script? It has a few scenes going on at the same time, so it's kind of hard to get a handle on things on your own." In UVoC (2019) you play a detective being introduced to a new investigative tool called the Acoustic Detective System. This presents an oddly immersive way of working through surveillance recordings: You send a little detective figure across a top-down map of the surveilled building, enabling you to hear what's being said around that avatar. Media player controls at the bottom of the screen allow you to skip through the scene and add comments to timestamps. Each of the five cases lasts between three and 15 minutes, but you need to go through them multiple times to hear what everyone says and does, so the game is a few hours long. In addition to pinning a name to each of the talking circles on your map, cases have you solve mysteries like Who stole the painting or Who detonated the bomb. There's usually some false leads or other complications, so you need to listen to everything before you make up your mind. While of course the cases use similar devices like mistaken identity, items clandestinely changing hands, and everybody being on the phone to each other, each is pretty unique and cleverly written. You might wish for more cases, but the game is really well paced and working towards an overarching plot revealed in case 5 (calling it open-ended is perhaps a bit much though). The pièce de résistance is the included Lethal Script DLC, which has 14 characters, half of whom don't know they are playing the other half. It's at the limit of being too meta, but still a wild and grimly fun ride. Among surveillance based games on GOG, UVoC is the one most purely about entertainment. Sound design and voice acting are excellent, the cases are satisfying without being too hard, and with a sprinkling of horror and humour alike, you're in for a fun set of brain-teasers presented in an innovative format.