Detective Instinct: Farewell, My Beloved

 

Detective Instinct: Farewell, My Beloved

Contains light spoilers!

I do not usually engage with visual novels although perhaps I should more. Detective Instinct: Farewell My Beloved is an indie visual novel game developed and published by Armonica LLC. I saw the visuals on Twitter/X and Reddit and it immediately caught my eye. After the deafening fog of Silent Hill 3, I decided to play a light-hearted game and I am glad I did.

Story/Gameplay

The game opens with a man in an autumn-yellow suit walking down the autumn-colored street. The game doesn’t wait for the punch line, and we see that the sad-looking man gets thrown off a window at a hotel, with a wound in his abdomen and he lies in the gutter, dead. Next, we hear door knocks and a young man is sleeping in his hotel room. It’s the police! We immediately help the teenager in his pajamas get up and open the door to a cop who is mad and anxious to capture us in connection with the murder of that man we saw earlier. It turns out this cop, Officer Loder, is short of a few nails in his steamer, and he mistakenly went to the hotel room 105 instead of 501. This laughable mistake is quickly excused by a detective Daltrey as he enters the scene with one of the catchiest character tunes in the game. Detective Daltery, a 40ish year-old man with an unerasable smile, flippant attitude and an odd sense of humor, gives us details of the crime that he really shouldn’t. The protagonist, the young man, aptly named Tholuros in this case, goes outside and notices his classmate Emma, a lovely-mannered blonde teenager with a pink hair clip. Together, we see a Professor Martin, the academic who is following our two young teenagers on their journey to do research for their thesis papers in English Literature. As Professor Martin warns us not to stay too late, Detective Daltrey comes by and actually invites us to the crime scene to investigate… I assume this is where Instinct part in the game’s title comes in. Anyway. We correctly deduce from the blood stain by the gutter that the victim did not just fall but was wounded by someone. We also find Daltrey’s missing wallet in the bushes nearby, which has absolutely and positively nothing to do with the crime. As we keep trying to guess whether Daltrey is a goofball, incompetent or perhaps a criminal mastermind, we leave the crime scene to the professionals and go on with our lives as students of English Lit. Now that both Tholuros and Emma did their research in the country they were studying, they leave for London on a train, with Prof. Martin. Little did they know what was about to happen on that train…

This is all in Chapter 1. Don’t worry, the game is longer than this. Though it took me five hours to finish and I was very slow. Thankfully, the game adds many more mysteries to draw you in. You will meet lots of interesting characters, each with their own unique personalities. The story may seem easygoing at first, but it takes a very serious tone after a while. You will encounter themes of revenge, sacrifice, love, complete desolation and activation of survival instinct brought by immigration and exploitation of people. The dialogue can be goofy, heartwarming and utterly heartbreaking at times and I did find myself shedding some tears in the end as the execution of the story was done so well.

The story reminded me of “The Lady Vanishes”, a 1939 film by Alfred Hitchcock and I would eat my hat if the game’s story were not even a little inspired by the film, even subconsciously. A lady, whom Emma makes acquittance of, after they boarded the train, vanishes. The country Tholuros and Emma studied in the game is a fictional town called Vendreka near another town called Ganbrika and Hitchcock’s fictional town in The Lady Vanishes was called Bandrika. Hmm…

The game is technically a whodunnit, but it is so easy to guess “who, what, when” that instead of who perpetrated the crime, the journey and the characters’ backstories mattered much more. The gameplay involves just point-and-click: you ask people questions, keep hitting “Talk” “Discuss” or “Check” tabs until the conversation ends. You do a little exploration on screen, but it really is very little. There is no work involved here, it’s really more about the story than the gameplay. You are never punished for guessing wrong and the questions are very easy anyway. Some sections end with a “Review” where you go through all the events that happened previously and Emma asks you questions. There were only one, perhaps two, occasions where I felt some difficulty answering but mostly you’ll breeze through the story. There are also a few code puzzles you have to solve, which are easy but fun.

As an indie game, this game’s story/gameplay is phenomenal and entertaining. I do hope the developers expand on their ideas and add more gameplay elements in the future: more exploration of clues on screen, more conversation choices that lead to locked endings, more clues that you use to unlock more questions etc.

One final thing: Monty is my favorite character. Sniff.

Graphics

We have lovely pixel art with pre-rendered 3D backgrounds and old anime-style drawings. They are beautiful and fun… and effective. See three examples of character expressions of the hideous Bartender:

Deranged Level Low

Deranged Level Mid

Deranged Level Max

I kid you not, I got shivers whenever there was a shift from the default face. The Bartender is a ghastly creature that takes pleasure from other people’s miseries and boys do the drawings help convey that feeling. 

The variety in the drawings also does not disappoint. The anime noir style comes in whenever a cutscene of the past is shown and it’s so much fun to watch. Where the art truly shines though is in the characters’ facial expressions which really complement the story and communicate emotions well.

Sound

The soundtrack composed by Joey Lopes is fantastic. I could not find a vgmdb entry, but the entire playlist is on YouTube. It appears that a JalopesTL uploaded them – I assume the account belongs to Joey Lopes. The full OST can be found here: https://jalopestl.bandcamp.com/album/detective-instinct-farewell-my-beloved-original-soundtrack

The soundtrack, full of lovely tunes with synth and real instruments, is very effective in the game. I particularly enjoyed the strings provided by the trio, Jeff Ball, Andrew Dunn and Ankita Prasad. My favorite tracks are Bartender (full on baroque to expose the crooked genius of the Bartender), Detective (the playful synth and guitar that encapsulate Daltrey’s easygoing nature), Sinister Golfer (the false mystery that hovers over our golf enthusiasts in the game, Dennis and Palmer, who got more going on between them than just golf clubs methinks!) and Solving Mystery.

Sound design is also great. Shattering of glass, the wow moments of crime solving, the sudden gasps at realization of a groundbreaking truth…all work!

Conclusion

Detective Instinct: Farewell My Beloved is a phenomenal indie visual novel game and a good detective story. I can picture many people playing this game with families and friends together, drinking hot chocolate (or say, brandy, whatever fancies people) on a winter night and enjoying themselves in a fun, easygoing but also poignant story. Personally, I literally played it as a bedtime story, and it caused vivid dreams full of mysteries. I wish the developers at Armonica LLC all the best in their next game!