Review: Little Problems: A Cozy Detective Game Is Quite Simple

Little Problems: A Cozy Detective Game is quite possibly the most self-explanatory title ever. It’s a detective game with a laid-back, low-stakes cases involving ordinary problems everyone faces. Help a young woman assist people through ten cases. Maybe if you can, space it out so you can spend a full two weeks taking on one assignment each day. It’s never too difficult or taxing, and taking your time with it means you’d also be able to overlook issues with it being potentially repetitive or quite brief.

Mary and her friend Sara got into Starford University! She wants to make the most of her first year, and she plans to keep a diary throughout it. Clearly, the goal is to become a responsible student and productive adult. Which means throughout the adventure, you need to help her solve ordinary, everyday issues to ensure everyone around her is happy and her life as a college student goes well. Aside from that, there’s not a really strong story to things. You basically see scenes in her life and work out what’s going on by observing people around Mary or going through messages she receives. 

Now, when I say these are ordinary issues, I mean it. For the sake of avoiding spoilers, I’ll go over only the first case. That situation involves a missing USB drive with a group report with a presentation Mary is doing with Sara and Andre. This means clicking to find the USB in Mary’s room, clicking on her phone, and clicking on the underlined “Sara,” “Andre,” and “USB” words when checking the messages there. This then allows you to press the Solve button on the screen to see the problem and come up with the solution. Statements will be there with missing words that can be filled in with clues you found. So, because the situation involves that presentation on the drive, the one that reads, “My _______ stick broke! I don’t have a backup of the group presentation, so I had to redo the whole thing…” would have the USB clue plugged into the spot. By filling in all the blanks, you get a Completion Rate score, an explanation of what happened, and an option to either stay to explore more or “finish the case.”

All of the situations involve stakes like that which are usually simple, but might take a few steps and logical puzzles to figure out dates, times, identities, orders, and such. So there’s a missing USB stick and dealing with how to get the new presentation redone. Finding out who broke a mug. Knowing what to add to a grocery list. Finding out when orders at a restaurant will go out. Determining who got the highest and lowest group project grades. Working out why someone is crying.

For those who aren’t as familiar with detective games like this, there are also optional elements to assist with getting through the adventure. The big one being a “show/hide clue markers” option. This will cause a question mark to show on items you should pay attention to when trying to solve a mystery. But also, when going through story segments, you’ll see little notes like “clues X/Y” so you can know if a clue is present and be able to click on highlighted words to add them to things you need to know for investigations. It’s all very visible. There’s also an option to take in-game notes on post-its. Though if you’re on Steam Deck, it’ll be difficult to take those down without an actual keyboard.

I will say that if someone isn’t familiar with detective and deduction games like Duck Detective: The Secret Salamior The Case of the Golden Idol, the tutorial isn’t the best at explaining what to do. Each scene really relies on you clicking around to explore the environment, investigate what might be hidden in bags, and clicking on people or things that stand out in the environment to get the word “clues” you need to plug in to the Mad Libs style statements under the Solve section. However, the first case involving the missing USB is so simple and swift that it does act as an solid introduction, so I’m sure people will get the hang of it after that. 

I feel like Little Problems: A Cozy Detective Game is a game you open up and play when you’re looking for a slight challenge to wind down. It isn’t excessively challenging. Going through it all in one or two sittings can call attention to its more tedious elements. Just spend a week or two helping Mary with some assignments at a relaxed pace, and you’ll probably have a pleasant time. But if you do want to go through it all at once, know it will take less than four hours to help Mary resolve all these situations. 

Little Problems: A Cozy Detective Game is available for PCs.

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