While there aren’t loads of them, there are quite a number of detective games on the Switch that I’ve enjoyed, ranging from the well-known exploits of Poirot and Professor Layton to the lesser-known ones of Jenny LeClue. When made well, a mix of story-telling, some personality, and satisfying mysteries that can be worked out with some clever deduction can be quite engaging. Now, if you stripped away all of the story, any of the personality, and just watered it down to wading through some clues to come to your conclusions and then move on… you’d have DETECTIVE - Scene Crime.

The most polite thing I could say is that this is a bare bones affair, simply plunking you into a collection of different environments that you’ll walk through looking for clues, hoping to put together the solution to whatever the crime in the area may be. Think of it as a walking simulator with a handful of meaningful objects among a bunch of useless ones, and you’ll get the general idea. So you’ll plod around, poking at or picking up anything you can, looking for different pieces of the puzzle that will help you answer the series of questions you must answer to solve the mystery and move on.

Outside of the complete lack of any personality at all to try to make this less of a slog, the controls are quite clumsy with a controller, and likely would work better with a mouse and keyboard. At times things that should have been simple, like grabbing a slider to see more text on a screen or hitting a button to close a window, could be aggravating, for sure. In one case it took about half a minute to figure out how to back out of a patient profile I was reading, and it was a bit maddening. Why even force the player to hit an X or some other element on the page somewhere, when you could simply have one of the controller buttons be “back”, or one of the sticks control scrolling a page, and not have to worry about pointing at all? Putting together the very dry overall experience, the lack of any visible heart, and the controls that don’t inspire any love, this simply doesn’t remotely meet the standard of its peers in the eShop.