Lower-budget games like this, for what’s ultimately the more casual end of the market, are always tricky to evaluate. On the one hand, they aren’t designed to be terribly complex, opening the door to more casual gamers working through them without an incredible amount of trouble, but on the other they can often be quite lacking when it comes to presentation and overall design. 

Much like its predecessor, Detective - Scene Crime, Rainy Night plays out a bit like a walking simulator where you’ll talk to people, gather clues, and then work to deduce what happened based on the evidence. While thankfully this version is at least a little less bare bones basic, pulling in some people to interact with, there’s still no mistaking that you’ll be moving and mostly looking at things that are of no use to you and that you can’t do anything at all with. This almost always ends up being one of my issues for games like this, as I understand you don’t want the environment to look completely empty, but at the same time when so much of what’s around you is only window dressing it gets aggravating trying to hover around to find one of the few things you can do something with.

Beyond that though, the presentation here is just poor on the whole. While the spaces have things in them they still have an overall sterility that’s odd. Character models are generally fair, but the quality of things like textures can vary quite a bit, making environments look plain odd. While you will be able to get into conversations with some characters milling about, the text windows are unusually large and obtrusive, and the dialogue itself just comes through as strange much of the time. While there’s a standing Objective in the upper-right corner, trying to simply figure out how to satisfy it mechanically too often can be a chore, given the limited interactivity of everything you work with. In all it just makes for an uneven experience, with no particular element standing out as redeeming, it’s all just sort of bland and uninspired.