Investigate This: Scarecrow!

Before the fiasco with Wright Brothers’ Mysteries, my plan had been to include this title in my review.  Two for one, that sort of thing.  However, Wright Brothers was so embarrassingly horrid that I thought I would be doing a disservice to the guys at Twist-EdGames.  I had reviewed two of their previous “games”, Shattered Slipper and Lucky, and I found them to be decent.  I mean, they weren’t really games.  They were like the end result of a book fucking a DVD menu.  Interactive in the loosest possible sense.  Read a lot of dialog, press A, read more dialog, and then press A some more.  Occasionally a rudimentary puzzle would pop up that would take all of thirty seconds to solve.  Typically, the whole thing would be over with in an hour or so.  Okay, so I wasn’t exactly glowing when I described what their games were like, but the writing was acceptable and they ended before they could bore.  Oh, and they were a little preachy.  I would equate the whole experience to reading a tween mystery novel, pausing only once to fiddle with a Rubik’s Cube, while being lectured by your mother on proper manners.

Actually, that sounds quite horrible.  Bad analogy.

“Hello Ma’am! Can we interest you in a copy of the Watchtower?”

Well, here’s their newest game: Investigate This.  You’re two young private detectives who get hired to investigate this super natural scarecrow that is trying to frighten a woman into selling her farm.  The difference between this and other Twist-EdGames?  It’s fucking boring.  The dialog has a tendency to drone on and on with inane banter that adds nothing to the plot and makes the characters come across like total twats.  The writing is also not up to the quality of previous games, despite the fact that there’s no soapbox this time around.  It just comes across like a really badly done Scooby Doo plot.  In fact, right during the big reveal at the end, just as I said that very line to Brian, the game made a Scooby Doo joke at its own expense.  I also felt the hedge maze stuff was more of a rehash of Lucky’s finale.  The final kick in the pants is the (required due to file size) 240MSP price tag.  It’s simply not worth it.  Thus, this becomes the first game of Twist-EdGames that I can’t recommend.  If I did so, I would need my head investigated for brain parasites.

Investigate This: Scarecrow! was developed by Twist-EdGames

240 Microsoft Points were hoping this game would star Batman in the making of this review.