So that's 20 hours of a enjoyable experience for a low price
That's a pretty good way of thinking about it. I'll take a closer look, then.
Yeah, it’s a fun experience, and thinking about it in those terms should make it more appealing.
I view it as a combination of Choose Your Own Adventure and a large puzzle book. When you visit specific locations, you are treated to a narrative of what happened, which is likely full of some sort of clue. You’ll want to jot down notes so that you can keep the information together. And at some point you likely will be poring over the London directory (thankfully not as large as the real one) and the newspapers. You may be able to connect the dots using these. When I played, our friend read the narrative and an offhanded remark was made by a character. My wife, who was absorbing the newspaper, said, “Oh really?” and immediately pointed to an entry that led us to a possible suspect.
If you’re doing this solo, I could see this being something you have sitting out next to your computer so that you could just turn your attention to it for 10 minutes and see if anything clicks.
I heard that the original game had you track how much time it took to travel to each lead, but that was needlessly complex. Despite us not needing to track time to solve the case, one guy kept protesting possible leads because they’d take us across the city. Since the score only cared about the number of leads you exhausted, I was not so worried about travel time. Our detectives would have had really sore feet.
