We all have our problems, but do you have Little Problems: A Cozy Detective Game? Perhaps not, as this indie title by Posh Cat Studios and Amplified Games is a little low-key, but, and in fear of giving you too much of an easy clue, it’s actually quite good and certainly engaging. While there’s a ‘cozy’ in the title, it’s not a game to power through and get 100% right in one go.
You play student, Mary, and solve ten different scenarios related to her life – be it the morning routine, college presentations, or family birthdays. While Jenny LeClue has a bit more of a Scooby Doo adventure, Mary’s is ‘normal’ and unexciting, yet very immersive once you get through the first two scenarios. Neither of these are bad, per se; they’re just on the rails and easy to guess and get right.
Little Problems: A Cozy Detective Game presents a handful of hand-drawn scenes per scenario, where Mary adopts a point and click method of finding points of interest. Clicking on keywords will add them to their inventory to put together a case before moving on to the next, which is quite similar to Duck Detective. For example, Mary will have to complete a sentence to summarise the scenario, selecting from drop-down clues that could be names, actions, and prepositions.
It’s all quite a natural process and adds to the casual element, but it’s sometimes difficult to retain the names of those in the scene. Fortunately, you can click back and forth with the solution and scene to revisit any clues and even add your own notes, which I didn’t do.
For those who get stuck, there’s a hint system and there’s an option to highlight any mistakes in Mary’s conclusions that operates as a cooldown – preventing you from spamming a solution either on purpose or accidentally. In truth, I had to use these a few times as I couldn’t perceive what was actually happening/expected of me, and as the Little Problems: A Cozy Detective Game continues, it gets slightly more complex (in a good way), and further interactive, adopting a Where’s Wally?/Waldo? approach to locate friends, or even completing a family tree, which was surprisingly challenging, yet fun.
There’s some marketing spiel that says the game is ‘easy to pick up, hard to put down’. I don’t typically buy into those sorts of things, but it’s accurate here. The visual style isn’t something that appeals to me, and the conversations are far too cute for me to relate to in real life, though it was equally charming and spirited me away to life as if I were a busy student, minus all the stress.
With ten stages and hidden objects to locate, there’s a lot of variety in Little Problems: A Cozy Detective Game, and I genuinely found it hard to put down once I got into it. Playing exclusively on the Steam Deck, it’s technically sound and was ideal to sit and play on the sofa while it pissed it down with rain outside. A wholesome, angelic experience that was both engaging and entertaining.
