The Painscreek Killings

---{Graphics}---
☐ You forget what reality is
☐ Beautiful
☑ Good
☐ Decent
☐ Bad
☐ Don‘t look too long at it
☐ MS-DOS
---{Gameplay}---
☐ Very good
☑ Good
☐ It‘s just gameplay
☐ Mehh
☐ Watch paint dry instead
☐ Just don't
---{Audio}---
☐ Eargasm
☐ Very good
☑ Good
☐ Not too bad
☐ Bad
☐ I'm now deaf
---{Audience}---
☐ Kids
☐ Teens
☑ Adults
☐ All
---{PC Requirements}---
☐ Check if you can run paint
☑ Potato
☐ Decent
☐ Fast
☐ Rich boi
☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer
---{Difficulity}---
☐ Just press 'W'
☐ Easy
☑ Significant brain usage
☐ Easy to learn / Hard to master
☐ Difficult
☐ Dark Souls
---{Grind}---
☑ Nothing to grind
☐ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks
☐ Isnt necessary to progress
☐ Average grind level
☐ Too much grind
☐ You‘ll need a second live for grinding
---{Story}---
☐ No Story
☐ Some lore
☐ Average
☑ Good
☐ Lovely
☐ It‘ll replace your life
---{Game Time}---
☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee
☐ Short
☑ Average
☐ Long
☐ To infinity and beyond
---{Price}---
☐ It’s free!
☑ Worth the price
☐ If u have some spare money left
☐ Not recommended
☐ You could also just burn your money
---{Bugs}---
☐ Never heard of
☑ Minor bugs
☐ Can get annoying
☐ ARK: Survival Evolved
☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs

This is one of my favourite games of all time and I only wish that I could play it again without knowing anything. I did play through the last part a few times to get all the endings, though, which was totally worth it.
There is a lot of walking around the town and figuring things out on your own and a few times I did have to go online for a clue that I was just looking right past, lol, but the sense of creeping dread and the beautiful location will always hold a place in my heart. It's an investigative game where you actually investigate and if you don't get the answers right you may become part of the mystery.

I found out about this game after playing the demo for "Scene Investigators" at PAX East 2020. The demo is live on their steam page and I highly recommend it if you like investigations/murder mysteries! This led me to finding and trying this game, EQ's first developed game.
The Painscreek Killings is a great (but maybe at times slow paced and convoluted) murder-mystery/walking-simulator type game. The investigation was so interesting that one of my friends watched me play through the entire game, and we were both so invested in the mystery that we would be thinking about this game and texting each other about it when not playing! The story was very interesting and it was a total treat to put the pieces together to see the final picture of what happened.
On a side note- This game has "horror" listed pretty far down in the tags, but at one point I screamed so loud that my husband came to check on me! Maybe others are braver than I am, but I could not have played through this game without someone with me for the entire journey.
Overall, I'd recommend this if you like mystery and deductive reasoning games, and wouldn't mind a bit of walking simulating and thrilling fear!

Every time you open a drawer, somewhere, a lion roars.

The Painscreek Killings is a masterful detective game at the best of times but some issues hold it back from reaching it's full potential.
It's a walking sim/detective game that tasks you (a journalist) with finding the suspect, motive, and murder weapon that killed Vivian Roberts. This quickly spirals into small town intrigue and conspiracy as other murders and foul play are discovered.
This game gave me a heart attack twice. 1. The hospital power 2. The ending
One of these was a scripted event that plays into a larger puzzle later. Fine. The other is one of the biggest issues with the game. I don't want to get into spoilers, but I had two suspects in my head when I found the ending, It stole the main conceit of the game away from me and was a let down both narratively and in gameplay.
I have several pages of handwritten notes that were very helpful but might get me committed if anyone else saw them. Highly recommend keeping a set and taking pics with the in-game camera and occasionally with my actual cam.
There's still a lot to recommend here. The game is beautiful and when the game clicks it truly is an immersive sim of investigation. Still, some of the interactions can feel pixel-hunty and cause you to miss an important key or item. Also I never would have found the item you need to use the wrench on without a walkthrough. It was the only thing I looked up and felt like I needed an extra clue or graphical standout that would draw me to the locations.
Brilliant first effort and I can't wait to see what comes next from this team.

I really liked this game, but I have no idea who I'd recommend it to.
It's not a puzzle game, unless you consider collecting keys, reading diaries, and looking for obscure clues written in stone on the sides of buildings to solve decades old lock box combinations as puzzles. That last one only actually happens once in the game, but you get my point. There aren't puzzles in this game, but rather you fall into a cycle of finding keys, pass codes, and letters. I'll give an example:
-You find a key and a letter
-You deduce what this key opens by referring to the letter
-The letter is vague and doesn't give a direct answer
-Person who wrote the letter has a house in town
-Go to their house
-The key opens the front door
-More letters and keys inside house
-Repeat
There's a lot more to it than that, but the overall goal is to collect keys and pass codes to open boxes, safes, drawers, chests, etc to find evidence for an investigation. This evidence comes in the form of letters, diaries, notes, audio tapes, etc you find in the locked containers. They reveal more about the town and characters you are looking into. You'll also find pass codes and hints written down as well. So there is A LOT of reading and exploring involved in this game and if you miss one piece of information or a key, you'll be heading back to track it down at some point I promise you.
It's not a detective game really either. Sure, you're trying to solve a murder from four years ago in a ghost town, but there's no one to interview and all of the evidence is located in diaries, pictures, letters, and notes left behind by the people who lived in Painscreek. By the end of the game you have all of the information on what exactly happened and you learn the full truth right before the last sequence anyway. So you can't really mess up the investigation.
So I have no idea what exactly to call this game. Interactive murder mystery? Key finder sim? I don't know. It's fun if you like puzzle games or exploration games. The story is pretty good and makes more sense towards the end. I like being able to take pictures to keep track of clues, but I wish you could have been able to write stuff done on a notepad or on the pictures directly. Would have helped immensely. Finding a new key or pass code was always exciting because it meant you have to find what it opens next. Think of the game as an escape room the size of a small town.
It's not without its faults however. The writing can be pretty plain at times and I felt that almost every character sounded exactly the same in their diaries and letters. The few audio clips in the game are not voiced well at all. They sound like the dev got their friends to deliver the lines. Graphically the game is ugly. It's a Unity game that reuses a ton of props, so like 50% of the games on Steam. The controls are clunky, especially trying to unlock things. To unlock a door you have to put your cursor directly over the keyhole, open your inventory, and then select the key you need for the door. Key's aren't always labeled, so sometimes you'll find yourself fiddling around with several keys before getting the door open and the process is very tedious at times.
The backtracking in this game is brutal. You will find yourself jumping around the town and revisiting locations many times. I think I went to the church 8 different times for various reasons throughout my play through. You'll get stuck at some point in this game, I guarantee it. And when you do you'll go online and search for help, only to find out the very thing you needed to progress was right in front of your face two locations ago. So off you go back to the Mansion for the 4th time. It will happen and it's not fun.
That all being said, I liked this game. It was short and had issues that many Unity games have, but overall I enjoyed it. If the devs clean up their writing and work towards reducing the ridiculous amount of backtracking they could make an incredible successor to this game.
Edit: I almost forgot to mention the light horror in this game. It's a little cliche at times, but overall I enjoyed the atmosphere. Dark corridors and abandoned buildings were all the more creepy to investigate. Light spoiler ahead: If you get the feeling that you aren't alone in Painscreek, you might be right...

A flawed* masterpiece of the genre.
* marred only by its final 5-10 minutes, that give away the solution (unlike, say, Paradise Killer) instead of making the players piece everything together in order to figure out what actually took place.