Samantha Lienhard
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Writing For
MonsterVine 
KeenGamer Latest Reviews
Take on the role of the duck detective once more as you head out for a camping trip and get caught up in a mysterious case featuring theft and vandalism.
A classic returns with this remaster of Onimusha 2: Samurai’s Destiny, giving the demon-fighting action-adventure game new life and proving it’s a classic for a reason.
One thing that helps elevate the game is its presentation. The graphics and animations are beautiful, with many little details that keep it feeling lively. In every aspect, you can see how much attention went into it to make it a high-quality experience. While it’s still a fairly short game, it’s the longest of the series. It also has some nice features, such as an optional recap of the plot when you load a game and an evaluation unlocked at the end that shows how well you did in each chapter and offers insight into your personality based on the choices you made. Overall, Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club truly feels in line with the Famicom Detective Club remakes, even if it lost a bit of the investigative gameplay, and I’d love to see this series continue on with more.
For a long time, I thought we would never see Ace Attorney Investigations again, let alone get an official translation of the second game. Now they’re finally here, available together in a single collection, and I’m happy to say it was worth the wait.
Duck Detective: The Secret Salami is a charming game with a good sense of humor and an interesting approach to mystery-solving. At times I wished it made its connections clearer to make clues feel more like actual clues instead of just a handy keyword list, but whenever I saw the word “deducktion” or pressed the quack button, I couldn’t help but smile. I don’t know if the developers are planning to do more with Duck Detective, but I’d be interested to see how they might evolve these systems in the future.
Now, since I had no prior experience with the second game, I can’t really compare it to the original release. From what I’ve looked up, however, there are some major story changes for the remake – to the point where when I read discussions about the sequel’s ending, it almost sounded like a different story. Why they changed it so much, I’m not sure, but it seems the original second game left several loose ends. With the chance to remake the story, perhaps they wanted to give it a more complete resolution in case a third game is never made. Nevertheless, if a third game ever is made in this remake’s style, I’d be interested to see where they would take an all-new idea… preferably with more puzzles.
The Final Word Detective Pikachu Returns might not push the boundaries in terms of graphics, and it certainly won’t bend your mind with its easy and straightforward deductions. However, it’s a charming game with cute character interactions, a good sense of humor, and an interesting story. Some games just make you feel happy when you play them, and I found Detective Pikachu Returns to be one of those games.
There are minor annoyances, such as explanatory tips that pop up every time you pick up an item and a reliance on auto-saves only, but overall it is enjoyable to play. While not the scariest horror game, it has its moments of tension and a nice approach to telling the story of both a child bullied at school and a town with a dark secret. Taking around 7 hours to finish with most collectibles found–and significantly less time once you know what to do–it’s just long enough to tell a complete story without overstaying its welcome.
As you play, you’ll unlock numerous extras for completing “challenges,” which are in-game achievements that correspond to the actual trophies/achievements if you’re playing on a platform that has them. Unlockables include new backgrounds for the sidebars, art and illustrations, and music. It’s always nice to get this sort of glimpse behind the scenes, so it feels like a nice way to reward the player’s progress. Less rewarding is the bonus unlocked once you beat the game, the “Ghost Puzzle” feature. Unlike the puzzles in the main game, these have nothing to do with ghost tricks or any of the game’s mechanics at all. Instead, they’re three sliding block puzzles, each with 3×3, 4×4, and 5×5 versions, where you must slide the panels into the correct position to recreate the scene. They’re fine, but they don’t add much to the experience aside from the additional unlockable art you get for completing them. I was perplexed by why this was the new content Capcom chose to make for the remaster, until I learned the sliding block puzzles were originally included in the Japanese iOS port. In that sense, it’s nice to have this content included.
Outside of the new storyline, Layers of Fear has some other useful additions. For players who don’t want to worry about the monster killing them (or get stuck on a chase one too many times), there is a safe mode option where enemies can’t kill you. For players interested in seeing different aspects of the story, there is a Chapter Mode that lets you start from any completed chapter to play through again and tracks your progress separately from the regular Story Mode. Meanwhile, the game looks beautiful, and I ran into only a few technical issues aside from a bug where I slowly fell out of the game world, which occurred twice during the painter’s story. Layers of Fear is an interesting approach to remaking the previous games, and I look forward to seeing if they intend to do any more with this series in the future.