Loco Motive review – a luscious point and click adventure let down by a lacklustre mystery

Loco Motive is one of those games that’s very easy to enjoy and feel like you’re having a jolly good time while you’re playing it. A point and click adventure in the vein of old LucasArts games, this is a funny and exquisitely animated romp across a 1930s Orient Express-alike that delights at almost every turn. It’s a murder mystery at its core, albeit one that isn’t afraid to laugh at its own expense and employ the same kind of daft puzzle logic as Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle did before it. There are so many things I like about it, so why did I feel increasingly indifferent to it by the time I hit the end credits?

I suspect that part of this is down to its underlying mystery, which mostly boils down to a fairly rudimentary will dispute, a little bit of tax fraud and not a lot else. Inheritance squabbles aren’t the most scintillating of subjects at the best of times, and there’s only so much comedic mileage that developer Robust Games manages to get out of jokes about tax evasion and predictably empty coffers (though to its credit, what it does manage to eke out of this rather dry subject matter is routinely very good and got more than a couple of smiles from me). More broadly, though, it’s also the kind of setup that just makes it easy to predict who its major villains and suspects are going to be. Train puns aside, there is nothing ‘loco’ about anyone’s motives here, and when the big reveal does finally come, it’s the kind of inevitable shoulder shrug you saw coming a mile off in the middle of act two.

It’s a shame, especially when Loco Motive gets off to such a strong start. Set in and around the murder of the moneyed Lady Unterwald – who’s mysteriously dropped dead during the reading of her own much anticipated and constantly updated will aboard a steam-powered express train – you first take control of her paperwork-loving estate lawyer Arthur Ackerman. As this bumbling giant with a heart of gold gets thrust into the role of a makeshift detective, he makes for a very affable lead as you get to grips with the game’s item-based puzzles.

In that classic adventure game mould, Loco Motive is all about applying the correct-shaped item to any given problem, grabbing and occasionally combining items from your Tardis-like jacket pocket to create new and increasingly silly gadgetry to get round the issue at hand. Most solutions are fairly self-evident, though some definitely stray into that ‘one leap of logic too far’ bucket that will have you tearing your hair out or repeatedly rushing toward the onboard tips phone to help you make those missing connections. Certain puzzle objects can come from all sorts of unlikely places, too, calling for careful interrogation of your environment to root out exactly what you need from it.

Indeed, with some items or information nuggets often lying behind several nested lines of dialogue, Loco Motive uses this opportunity to put its witty script front and centre. The genuinely funny writing does a lot of heavy lifting here, elevating its cast so they feel like they’ve all been plucked straight from the pages of an Agatha Christie novel. Ranging from snarky wealthy widows and idiot sons to sleazeball con artists, crafty accountants and overly stressed chefs to name just a few of the passengers you’ll be rubbing shoulders with here, nearly every single character in Loco Motive works extremely hard to keep you entertained. Every line is beautifully voiced, with even the most minor characters receiving characterful and endearing performances from their respective voice actors – though after a couple of hours of thorough excavation, the appeal of such verbose flavour text definitely started to wear a bit thin for me. I quickly stopped seeking out those extra lines, keeping my enquiries to the topic at hand rather than choosing to spend more time in their company.

The construction of the game’s individual puzzle arcs is almost too neat for its own good as well. The emphasis for solving them is always squarely focused on how items and events relate to the next link in the ongoing puzzle chain, not with the hows and whys of who actually dunnit. The murder itself ends up getting pushed into the background as a result, which is perhaps why the eventual climax falls so flat. Your motivation for helping these characters is never really in the service of finding Lady Unterwald’s killer, but simply to see what the next funny puzzle solution might be. What’s more, Loco Motive has an increasingly bad habit of wrapping up a character’s storyline as soon as their puzzle arc has been completed, effectively ruling them out as potential suspects and thereby narrowing its potential murder pool even further.

There’s a pretty good attempt at playing about with the overarching timeline of the murder to add in fresh details and layers of intrigue, as once Arthur’s story is wrapped up, the torch is passed to not one, but two additional protagonists. First up is the rather more tiresome detective novelist Herman Merman, whose grating cries of “No!” and “That doesn’t work!” with each incorrect puzzle attempt make him an infinitely worse hang by comparison. His storyline sheds fresh light on events leading up to Lady Unterwald’s murder, but once again the game does such a good job with typing up any loose plot threads it introduces here that there’s barely anything left for its third and final protagonist – Inland Revenue secret agent Diana Osterhagen – to actually investigate. Indeed, her story arc feels particularly truncated compared to her male counterparts, which is disappointing when she’s so much more fun to hang out with than the interminable Herman.

But even though Diana’s act is perhaps a little rushed on its own, Loco Motive does just about manage to pull it back for a great final puzzle finale that makes excellent use of all three protagonists. Again, though, it’s the cerebral set pieces that stick in the memory here rather than the nuts and bolts of the main mystery, which for some may well be enough. For me, it’s that tight marriage between plot and puzzles that makes for a truly great detective game in my books, and Loco Motive just never quite strikes the right balance. It’s a perfectly enjoyable way to spend six to eight hours, but after the thrilling ingenuity of more recent murder mystery games, such as The Rise of the Golden Idol, Loco Motive ultimately feels a bit flat by comparison. All that said, I’m dying to see what Robust Games end up doing next, as this studio has a clear passion for point and click games, and it’s already nailed the sense of humour that really makes them sing. If it can join up those dots to a meatier kind of mystery story, I suspect their next game could be absolutely killer.

A copy of Loco Motive was provided for review by publisher Chucklefish.