I have a bit of a soft spot for detective games. The Last Case of John Morley comes from Indigo Studios and JanduSoft. I guess it is time to get out the deerstalker hat, magnifying glass, and smoking pipe.

“Step into the mind of John Morley, a 1940s detective on his final case. Explore shadowed places long forgotten by time, and piece together crime scenes in a narrative adventure steeped in mystery, unexpected twists, and a truth buried for decades.”

You play as the titular detective, John Morley. After waking up and recovering in a hospital following your last case and later in your office, you are approached by Lady Margaret Fordside who hires you to learn who murdered her daughter 20 years ago. That’s the set up and you head to the abandoned manor where Lady Margaret used to live and where her daughter was brutally slain. It’s a cold case that the police gave up on, yet Lady Margaret is convinced that her daughter’s killer is still at large.

As I wrote in the introduction, I have a soft spot for detective games. I love scouring for clues, questioning suspects, cross-referencing evidence, eliminating dead ends, and bringing the criminal to justice. Sadly, The Last Case of John Morley has none of that. In fact, I wouldn’t even call this one a detective game at all, despite the fact that you play as a 1940s detective hired to catch a killer. What you get here is a linear walking sim with some janky graphics and controls.

While there is some very, very, very slight exploration, the path you take is very much an A to B to C one, with no alternate routes or possible variation to the outcome. As with all walking sims, you walk a lot and occasionally find something to interact with. Pick up an item, look at it, put it back down. Pick up a letter/note, read it, put it back down. There are some items that you pick up and keep, but they’re usually basic things like a key for a locked door or a crowbar to pry nailed boards from a doorway. There are zero logic or lateral-thinking puzzles, and the extent of a “puzzle” in The Last Case of John Morley rarely extends to much more than finding a note with a number on it, and that number being used for a lock elsewhere. There was one “puzzle” that involved flicking switches in a specific colour order, that took me about 4 seconds to work out.

There’s just nothing here to tax the brain, nothing that makes you feel like you are a grizzled 1940s detective. You do kind of do some detective work, well… the game does it for you. Occasionally, you enter a room where something happened and there will be a green-lighted item that you need to interact with. This leads to a short scene that shows you what happened to/with that item 20 years ago. Areas will have multiple green items you need to interact with, and the scenes spell out wherever incident occurred. But that’s it. You don’t have to work anything out, you don’t use any detective skills, you just interact with something and a scene plays out.

On this subject, within the reality of the game… how the hell has nothing been disrupted or rotten away in 20 years? You find physical evidence, like blood, that still looks fresh despite being two decades old. Handwritten notes are perfectly preserved for you to read, etc. Considering that the manor which you investigate had been abandoned for 20 years, aside from the odd broken chair, it’s in pretty great condition, and evidence of the murder looks only a few days old.

Regardless, The Last Case of John Morley is a “low effort” game, because you don’t really do much other than walk around and interact with items that will eventually lead you to the killer in a very linear way. Which brings me to the story. For me, that was very much the best and yet, the most patchy part of the game. There were times when the story was quite intriguing, but it also feels very shallow and working out who the killer is was not all that hard. I took a guess at the killer’s identity just 10 minutes into my playthrough, and I was right. By the time I got to the end of the game and the big “reveal”, it really wasn’t that much of a surprise. It’s really kind of obvious as it is telegraphed quite heavily early on.

Coming with a budget price of around £10 and available now on PC, PlayStation and Xbox. The Last Case of John Morley isn’t a particularly long game. I got to the end credits in just over an hour and 40 minutes (it is very linear and everything is telegraphed to you). During that playthrough, I got every achievement except one (I missed one clue), there’s no replayability as there are no alternate paths or variations to the story, so the longevity is zero. A detective game where you play as a detective, but don’t do any actual detective work. Just follow the linear path, interact with items and see out a good but flawed story. I think this may have worked better as a short story or novella instead of a game.