FORENSIC – M.E. Protocol – PC Review

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FORENSIC – M.E. Protocol is a new crime scene investigation simulator developed by k148 Game Studio and published by JanduSoft, that hit the Steam shelves on May 28th. Step into the shoes of a forensic investigator, check out crime scenes, and try your best to solve the case!

A Different Kind of Murder Investigation

An investigator game like this honestly sounds fun on paper. Usually, in these kinds of games, you are either just a regular cop or the guy who gets sent to clean up after the fact. Getting to actually work on the forensic side of things is a great concept, but the execution isn’t without its flaws. Have you seen a game like this before? Let me know in the comments!

Gameplay

In FORENSIC – M.E. Protocol, you play as a forensic investigator tasked with analysing crime scenes and drawing conclusions from what you find. When you arrive at the scene, it is your job to examine the area, place evidence markers, collect evidence, and take photos of every potentially important thing you may come across.

The core gameplay is all about using a bunch of different tools to gather information. You will be doing the standard crime scene stuff that you are probably familiar with if you have ever watched any crime show. Lift fingerprints, collect blood samples to analyse back at your PC, and look for anything suspicious. If you find a phone, you can dig through it to find any evidence of conflict or to hopefully get some information on the case. Sometimes there are some witnesses too. You can question them, but don’t always believe what they tell you.

For trickier spots, you get a drone and a little robot to act as your eyes. They can fit in tiny corners or check in high up spots that you can’t reach by yourself. Once you have collected everything, the case wraps up with you putting the clues together to figure out what happened. Of course, all that is just a rough overview, so let me get into some more details and things that bugged me a bit.

The Concept vs. The Execution

Inherently, there is nothing really broken about FORENSIC. The concept itself is something I really like, and the core gameplay loop, for the most part, functions the way it is supposed to. However, it also isn’t without its flaws.

To start off, the game isn’t great at explaining things. The tutorial is basically just a series of text boxes that pop up on your screen, which doesn’t really help much. The controls aren’t exactly straightforward at times either, but you do eventually get the hang of them as you play. It is a bit easier to figure things out once you look at the gear inside your van, as the equipment boxes have little tips that explain how to use the tools.

Once you are working on a case, by default, when you get near a piece of evidence, a prompt pops up telling you exactly what tools you need to use. For example, it will explicitly tell you when to use the spray that makes hidden blood visible. On the one hand, it’s nice because it cuts down on tedious grinding and stops you from spraying that stuff everywhere. On the other hand, it completely spoils the mystery by giving away the fact that evidence is even there in the first place. Thankfully, you can turn these hints off. Unfortunately, I learned about that very late when going through the settings to change some other things. That’s on me though, I guess.

My Complaints

Another major let-down is how the game handles digital evidence. As mentioned earlier, you can find and sift through phones on the scene to look at photos and text conversations that might help the case. Unfortunately, the execution here feels lazy. The images are very clearly AI generated (they at least pre-warn you about this in the Steam description), which feels incredibly avoidable, and a lot of the text messages don’t fit the style or personality of the person who supposedly wrote them. It makes the old next-door granny sound like a teenager and really pulls you out of the experience a bit.

The witnesses you interview don’t offer much depth either. When you talk to them, they come across as very bland, often giving you very brief answers. Instead of letting you read between the lines and figure stuff out yourself, the game sometimes automatically draws the conclusions for you, telling you if someone is probably lying. Similarly, the final results you get from analysing can spoil some other evidence pieces. For example, after checking out a pool of blood, the game straight-up told me it had dripped from a wrench that was thrown onto a small ledge high up on the wall. Up until that moment, I had no idea a wrench was even up there, much less involved in the case at all. It just feels like an oversight.

The cases themselves are really not hard to solve. The only difficulty comes from trying to “perfect” a level, mostly because some clues are a bit annoying to find, and the game isn’t always clear about which piece of evidence is the most important to turn in at the end. Overall, it really is not a hard game whatsoever. There is no penalty for getting things wrong or missing some evidence. The game tells you everything in the summary, so even if you come to the entirely wrong conclusion, there is no replayability for the case, because the game just lets you know what happened.

Graphics & Audio

Visually, FORENSIC goes for a semi-realistic art style that is relatively common for the detective genre. It looks fine for what it is, and everything in the world feels visually coherent. However, the AI-generated content is just sad to look at. Honestly, I would have preferred it if they just had not put any images there at all. They don’t add much to the game and aren’t really case relevant in the majority of cases. If you really wanted to add them, any basic stock footage would have done it too.

Audio wise, the game builds some nice suspense during the loading screens with some fitting background music. Once you are actually inside the case, it switches to a typical night soundscape with crickets chirping and the likes. At least for outdoor cases. I don’t mind the lack of background music, it feels less distracting this way. I have no complaints about the tool sounds either, they all make the exact noise they are supposed to make and add a nice little touch to the game.

Longevity

FORENSIC features nine main cases plus a quick tutorial one. As I mentioned before, solving them doesn’t take very long unless you are really trying to get a perfect score. I managed to wrap up the entire game in a bit over 3 hours, and it would probably take me another if I wanted to perfect it.

Replayability might technically be possible down the line, once you forget how a case ends, but the general gameplay loop isn’t outstandingly fun, so I doubt I will return to the game in the future. If you want to collect all the Steam achievements, there are a few to grab, but they aren’t anything special and most are unlocked through normal gameplay. They just need you to solve every case with at least a B rank and get one perfect S rank. Nothing too out there.

Final Thoughts

At the end of the day, FORENSIC – M.E. Protocol is not a bad game, it just feels a bit clunky to me. The core concept is actually pretty fun, and since it’s quite cheap, just a bit over 10 bucks, it may be worth a shot if you are super into detective-style games and want to check it out for yourself! Just make sure to change the hint setting if you want a challenge, so you don’t end up stuck in easy mode like me.

If you can look past some of the awkward mechanics and the AI images, this can be a decent little afternoon game, or something to keep you occupied after work for a day or two.

All in all, I am giving FORENSIC – M.E. Protocol the Thumb Culture Silver Award!

Disclaimer: A code was received in order to write this review.

If you enjoyed this review, why not check out my previous article about a game I enjoyed even less!

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Charlie

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