Crookhaven

I've completed every Fire Maple puzzle game, and this one must be their latest release. Starting with Mystery Manor, which I played as a kid, compared to previous titles where you'd collect a bunch of items in your inventory without knowing where to use them, this installment does a great job connecting the clues. The gameplay flowed exceptionally smoothly, with hardly any major roadblocks. Hints were provided at just the right moments, allowing me to finish in just over two hours. However, the issue with this installment lies in the excessive similarity between buildings. I often found myself circling aimlessly around the town. Additionally, many scenes felt overly sparse—lots of textures applied but only one or two usable clues. There were also far too many NPC conversations. I hope future scenes can incorporate more interactive items. All in all, I'm looking forward to the next installment. I hope Fire Maple keeps making these—I'm personally a big fan of realistic-style puzzle games. One more suggestion: the in-game map can be overwhelming. Adding a camera feature to capture clues you want to remember would make it perfect.

I’ve been a big fan of fire maple games for years, ever since I found Lost City. But I have to say I’m the most disappointed in this one of all of them. The AI art was very obvious and did not capture the feeling of the art style of the previous games. Using AI art combined with the fact that this is the most expensive game fire maple has released yet is a combination I was not happy about. In terms of gameplay, I found the “puzzles” in this one lacking, too many were just fetch quests for npcs. The map is very large and while that seems like it would be a good thing, many scenes had nothing interactive and existed only to lengthen the walk between other important scenes. I spent an annoying amount of time walking back and forth between the same two npcs ferrying messages. If the creator reads this, please take it as constructive criticism. I love fire maple games and want to play more in the future, but not if they are like this one. The AI art took away the charm of the other games and the map and story felt like they were packed with filler to make the game play longer. I hope the next game from fire maple doesn’t repeat these trends.

Crookhaven is one of the better games I’ve played from this developer. The sequence of the scenes are easy to remember, the puzzles are interesting and intuitive, and there are bits of humor thrown in as well. The photorealistic character portraits are excellent and add to the quality of the game. The only downside is that after a while, my iPhone 15 pro max starts to get really hot and I feel like I need to stop playing the game to let it cool down before continuing. Other than this quirk, the game is great and I hope to see more like this in the future.