I have never played a CSI game before. I have never played a TV franchise-based game before. I have also never watched an episode of the original CSI, or any of its other exciting spawn. What I have played are lots and lots of puzzle games. Some newer puzzle games verge into the murky, uncertain land of “third person adventure” titles, and thus lose a certain something found in more traditional point and click adventures and investigation. Some, far older games, were text-based adventured, or slightly later, the early LucasArts titles. Even if it doesn’t want to, CSI: Deadly Intent: The Hidden Cases fits rather uncomfortably (and yet quite smoothly) into the adventure game model, even if it relies too heavily on mini games.

Of course, entry into the world of The Hidden Cases is both slightly jarring and slightly amusing. This is a world where anything not blood-related is cast in a bluish, antiseptic light (except when dangerous, sexy locations are depicted), people speak in only the most unironic and characterless of registers, and the investigators always win in the end. The TV survives and thrives because the procedural is a compelling, easily replicable and structurable television format. Within its relatively narrow confines, characters can, if the writers choose to allow them to do so, develop, die, and grow wise and weary.

Mostly, it’s enough that said investigators be serious, professional men and women (some attractive, some too businesslike or dorky to be attractive, if they are men), and that they each have one or two character tics so that audience members can easily “relate” to them, and so newcomers know exactly who they’re dealing with from the get-go. Sadly, not a bit of the shows carefully crafted, highly repetitive formula makes for a good game.

CSI is a completely stiff, unexciting, inarticulate game. It attempts to telegraph the techno beat-filled, catch phrase dropping, and professional atmosphere that exists so ubiquitously in the world of the show, but it comes off as completely lifeless. Games already have enough problems convincing us that anyone in the is in any way exciting or multi-faceted: they don’t need these worse-than-lifeless scripts and plots to hinder them more.

Of course, this being a very official The Hidden Cases game, there was never a chance of escaping out from under the heel of the show. What the game could have done right, it does not. Murder msteries, really all mysteries when you get down to it, are quite exciting. Even if it’s only The Great Brain, or Scooby Doo, or some other childish pursuit, mysteries entice us. We love to read about investigators both smart and foolish, as they discover clues, destroy alibis, and sniff out the culprit. The idea of taking part in such a mystery is an incredibly potent notion, and it’s the model that most adventure games (if only in passing) take many of their cues and directions from.

Adventure games are long, fiddly things. If they aren’t long, then they have exciting, new stories, or some other radical attraction (see Machinarium or The Blackwell Chronicles for examples of the latter and the former, respectively) to keep things interesting. CSI has no such allure. Each case takes between an hour and an hour and a half to complete. None of the cases feel substantial; if they felt in any way weighty or exciting, I could care less about their length.

A game like this needs not only exciting characters and cases (it doesn’t have those), it needs interesting puzzle mechanics and a variety of interesting locations. When I started the first case, I was intrigued to notice that, post-case, I would be graded on my efficient and skilled exploration of different game mechanics. This is an excellent idea. What if, in my rush to point the finger of blame at Suspect A, I miss crucial pieces of evidence that would instead lead me to Suspect B (or if I dug further, would in fact reveal a third person to be the culprit).

I’ve no doubt that this kind of noded, multi-threaded gameplay would be difficult to create and muster upon the screen, even if there is no spoken dialogue in the game.Still, imagine my disappointment when I realized that the judging I was so excited to have passed upon me was in fact simple and boring. In-game, when you use your stylus to explore the drab environments for clues, objects or locations of interest will be highlighted in yellow. Once you select these items, you are often given a set of tools to pick from. Thus, you must learn in which situations it is appropriate to simply bag evidence, to dust it for prints, to photograph it, or carry out a number of other activities. The game grades you on how often you pick the right activity first. I can’t think of a more underwhelming, unexciting way to do “better” on a case.

The same lack of depth rears its head during the game’s interrogation scenes. Here, your annoying captain lunches vaguely conservative, secretly masculine attacks on your subjects. Every once in a while, he will turn to you and ask you to push the interrogation forward, using the proper bit of evidence (a stolen comb, or perhaps some sexually related “fluids,” as the game breathlessly yet scientifically, names them). It would be great if, during these sequences, you could pick the wrong evidence, ask the wrong question, or follow the wrong trail of clues. There’s nothing worse than a botched investigation, and I know I would love to go back and get that kind of thing right.

This is the central problem with The Hidden Cases. They are in no way fluctuating or changing. In fact, you cannot progress to the next set of puzzles unless you have completely cleared each area of objects and clues first. All of the corpse perusals, data restructuring, and finger print dusting (and by that, I mean all of the mini games) in the world can’t save a game where everything happens one way, and one way only. This game is as lifeless as its favorite topic of discussion, and it’s party to the worst mystery game experiences I’ve ever had.

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The Good: Not much.

The Bad: Investigations are nothing but dressed up mini games, and you’ll never want to replay them.

The Ugly: The mysteries and story are bad, the characters are worse, and you never feel like you’re “investigating” anything at all.

Playthrough: Played through all four cases: it took about 4-5 hours for me.

Recommendation: You can buy better mystery games on the DS (Hotel Dusk) and better puzzle, mystery, and adventure games on the PC (any Sherlock Holmes games, for starters, the Gabriel Knight games, if you’re old school, etc.).

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