Little Problems: A Cozy Detective Game
Little Problems: A Cozy Detective Game is a relaxing slice-of-life puzzle game where you investigate daily life scenes to find clues and piece them together in a scrapbook-style interface. Instead of solving crimes or murders, you’ll follow the story of Mary during her first year at university. In the ten chapters of the game, you’ll get to meet her friends and family, see her tackling group projects, getting exam results, hanging out with friends, and even attending a Halloween party.
The gameplay loop consists of exploring scenes, interacting with objects to collect clues, and gradually combining bits of information extracted from these clues. You’ll sift through characters’ inventory items like school forms, schedules, and phone text messages to identify their names, activities, hobbies, grades, etc. These will then be used to fill in the blanks of a given scrapbook page, where you’ll not only have to assign the correct details to each of the characters (names, clothing items, interests, grades, profile pictures), but also identify the missing words of a short blurb describing what actually happened in that scene.
The puzzle challenge lies in extracting the right details and linking them together. While the process can be engaging, it often comes out as trickier than it seems, especially in later chapters, where clues become extremely fragmented. For example, phone messages may use pseudonyms or unrelated avatars, forcing you to cross-reference initials from library cards, school forms, clothing descriptions, and inventory items to deduce who’s who and what they’re up to.
A hint system with a quick recharge time highlights clues in the environment, prompting you to link them together, but in fact, it hardly provides enough guidance to fully piece together key information, such as a character’s full name or portrait. Much more useful than it is the feature that lets you verify whether your answers are correct for a given section. Unfortunately, this sometimes encourages players to brute-force their way to solutions, which considerably decreases the fun and makes the game seem less intuitive.
Another negative aspect of the puzzle mechanic is that the game often expects you to recall details from previous chapters (such as characters’ hobbies, names, or appearances), without offering a reference log or encyclopedia. This means you’ll need to re-select previously learned information manually, which can be tedious, and especially difficult if you return to the game after a few days’ break and in the meantime you forgot all these details about the characters.
Despite these flaws, Little Problems: A Cozy Detective Game is a colourful game, with heartfelt stories about friendship and college life. Its cozy atmosphere and gentle storytelling are pleasant, though somewhat lacking depth. The puzzle design can feel overly complex and occasionally illogical. Discovering the correct solution often requires some sustained mental effort and ultimately becomes a test of patience. The game has no missable achievements (you can replay any chapter) and takes five hours to complete on average, depending on your deduction skills.