真探

I'm marking positive because Steam doesn't have a middle-of-the-road option. Most of the game is genuinely good and enjoyable, but the ending is downright absurd and turned this game from a reasonable puzzle game into nonsense dream logic. Expecting people to remember things from prior cases (which were solved IRL days ago) is unfair with no prior warning. Expecting people to randomly look through the game's steam files to find a new file that wasn't there before in order to get the ending is completely ridiculous, and I never would have known to do that if not for a walkthrough. That's not clever, that is literally completely random.
There are also a lot of issues with the English translation that pretty much any fluent English speaker would have been able to fix. It was still playable, but definitely noticeable for a game whose gameplay is 100% reliant on text. According to the latest update, there should be a retranslation for this game coming out soon. I'd recommend waiting until then.

this is a very good detective game as long as you're willing to use hints a few times per case. minor translation errors are frequent, but generally don't meaningfully impair your understanding.

Great text-based deduction game (my favorite genre). If you loved The Roottress are dead, Type Help, and Strange Horticulture, you're going to love this one (and the sequel, too). People say CaseCracker is similar to Orwell (and some call it a rip-off), but from my experience playing the Orwell demo, CaseCracker is a tenfold more difficult and therefore interesting.
In the game, you are a tester of a police-database integrated system called -- wait for it -- CaseCracker; you essentially treat it as a very specific search engine, searching for everything like people, places, events, items. Your primary task is to solve murder cases with the help of the said database. You are assigned an assistant whom you can ask for hints.
I believe that the game can be finished within about 5-6 hours if you don't pay much attention to the extended mysteries or to drawing out the timeline of the plotline. Getting 100% of the achievements would take you extra time as a lot of them are related to small details.
The cases become harder to solve as you progress in the game. It definitely requires you to have a real life notebook near your computer. Sometimes you might get stuck (no new clues) which would make you re visit the clues you've already found, which is kinda annoying but reminds you how attentive you should be to each clue. Yes, you will be tasked to read. You won't be asked to read a lot -- a clue is on average has a size of a paragraph.
The user interface is comfortable. You can either type stuff into the search bar yourself or highlight the word in the text with your cursor, which will make it appear in the searchbar autamatically and also copy this word for use elsewhere.
Overall, CaseCracker is worth every penny. I hope that the developers keep up the good work and keep expanding the Chicheng city universe.
P.S. SPOILERS AHEAD! The Lana Del Rey entry is the funniest thing ever. I mean it.

What a great little game. By the fourth case, I was using a pad and paper, and that made me incredibly happy. The mysteries are complex and rise in difficulty by virtue of the sheer amount of information in each case. The meta-mysteries are interesting and have a lot of real-life overlap, with some supernatural elements that remind me of the Paranormasight games, Chinese edition. Don't play this on deck unless you have no alternative: I started there and a keyboard and real mouse make life a lot easier. Contrary to other reviewers, I did not find the localization particularly poor. I can give you a list of much much worse if you like. I think the characters are all believably unique and the writing is good. Not a huge memory drain, if anything this is one step up from a text adventure and the last several decades of hardware could do it. Worth the buy in a bundle, I am really looking forward to the subsequent games. I had fun, and after completion and some rereading of my notes, I went for the guide to snag about five outstanding achievements. This is a gem of the investigation genre, go for it!

Enjoyed this game mostly for the over-arching story and how rich it was. The characters felt real, or maybe a better word would be plausible. Game respects the player's intelligence and doesn't hold your hand too much, giving you the option of how you prefer your hints, should you need them.
That being said, there are occasional moments when you have to try a few different variations as the search bar can be particular about the way it accepts keywords. There are also a few minor translation hiccups here and there, but I wouldn't say they take anything away from the game, more like spelling errors.

pretty enjoyable overall, solved most of the clues myself though got help from guides when i was stuck.

Well. We are too drunk to write a proper review.
Was fun. Very difficult. Very brain. We had to cheat some times, but that's okay.
Pro tip: Don't drink when playing this game. It didn't work out well for us. But the important part is that we had fun.
Thanks.