Wolf Peak: The Case of Ruth Choi

I recommend this game but with a heavy asterisk. You might get frustrated with it and bounce off hard. The first frustration I ran into was the options menu or lack of important options in there. There was no audio adjustment, so I had to manually turn down my audio when I played the game. The second is the lack of mouse sensitivity slider. It's incredibly frustrating when I'm whipping around at such a high speed because I can barely control myself. I also had to turn on vsync to not have the game wildly generate worthless frames and start heating up my pc. Before I turned it on, the FPS counter was in the high hundreds or thousands and I could hear my PC fans whirring. After I turned on vsync? Kept at a solid 60 fps and the fans turned quiet(er). The final frustration came from the evidence testing. Some of the tests are obvious, some of them are not. I honestly used a guide to find everything just so I didn't feel like I was wasting my time to pick the right ones.

I found the investigation into the story interesting. I enjoyed reading everything and looking at all the evidence and putting things together interesting. I'm a bit mixed on presentation of the various suspects. There are so many red herrings. I kind of narrowed it down to likely 3 people at the beginning and none of the harder evidence convinced me otherwise. Ironically, the person I thought likely did it, did not. I will say that I enjoyed it up until I realized who did it but I couldn't really figure out the why part of it. I figured them out based on means, opportunity, and some really strong direct evidence but motive was lacking which makes it a bit of a letdown. I did enjoy the ending cutscene which makes sure it's clear you got the right person.

TLDR: If you're looking for another investigative game, this can fill that niche but I'd recommend the better games in the genre first (Obra Din, Curse of the Golden Idol series, The Roottrees are Dead, or The Painscreek Killings).

Pure, distilled detective work. No open world, branching story lines, or unrelated size puzzles. Just evidence (and a lot of it) to search through, and one sole task, figuring out who killed Ruth Choi in 1991. This game clearly wears its Twin Peaks inspirations on its sleeve, however this game is much more grounded in reality.
A little rough around the edges at times, such as being unable to adjust mouse sensitivity in-game, but stuff like that often comes with the territory with indie games. For fans of the Golden Idol games, Return of the Obra Dinn, or The Rootrees are Dead, I think there's a lot to like here.

The Good
I don't always have the patience for text-heavy games, but this is well-written enough to keep me interested! I read a solid 95% of the evidence.
Unlike some of the other reviewers, I didn't have any issue with the evidence testing mechanics. I believe I found all pieces of information from my own testing, except for one, without the guide.
The characters and the possibilities that come from their lives, personalities, and backstories are creative and thought-provoking.
The office is laid out in a way that made sense to me. I appreciated that we didn't just dig through a book of evidence or something. Working through the space allowed me to remember where I found certain pieces of information that I needed to return to.
The game has a nice soundtrack, nice graphics, and the right amount of voice acting (the VA is similar to Paradise Killer.)
Unlike similar detective games (i.e. Painscreek Killings), where the player really must suspend disbelief to immerse themself in puzzles and extremely detailed diaries, this format feels easier to lean into as a detective.
Though I can see an argument being made both for and against it, I appreciated the automatic map and case notes! I think knowing some key points would be saved made me more willing to actually read everything, and it prevented the "everything is important, so now nothing is important" method of note-taking that can occur in a detective game like this.
The Okay/Disappointing
There are a lot of red herrings. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad the culprit isn't obvious! But all of the excess information, without much possible deduction (more on that later), ultimately led me to craft a theory that explained even more of the evidence (something that, on a meta gaming level, I expected I would need to do), and was, to me, more interesting than what the actual solution was, with less leaps of logic needed to get there.
Some of the evidence left me with questions - particularly, evidence found at the crime scene itself, with no reason or explanation for why it was there. I kept digging through all the evidence/testimony/etc, over. and over., hoping new discoveries or ideas would allow me to eliminate or explain one small piece of evidence or testimony at a time. Unfortunately, many things cannot be explained away. One particular piece of crime scene evidence, unfortunately, did give me quite a headache/misled me a bit... There was no way to deduce it's true purpose, as far as I could find. You just had to shrug it off to get the solution. I needed a guide for that.
This isn't a deductive, but an inductive reasoning game.
Evidence on the board can only be connected one layer deep, and pieces of evidence cannot be connected. This simplicity is, I think, the reason so much inductive reasoning becomes required; it's a solution to the restrictions of the gameplay mechanics.
I had a full case against 4 suspects, started the process of sorting the evidence on the board and submitting each one, then got frustrated and looked at the guide for the "correct" answer. Each of the 4 full cases I had contained all possible links I could think of, and I could provide an inductive reason for each piece of evidence being true. Once I cleared up the frustration with that oooone piece of unexplainable evidence mentioned above, I understood what the intended answer must be, I just didn't like it lol.
Inductive reasoning is required, but there is no place for it within the games mechanics. Even being able to link pieces of evidence together and then to a suspect, would be nice. As would being able to pin specific passages or keywords from the diary, witness statements, and suspect interviews to the board. Simply connecting a 15 page document to a suspect could mean a LOOOT of different things.
The playtime is lower than what I'd expected for the price, especially since I found 4 solutions (again... you really can't deduce much beyond that, in my opinion... the core gameplay is about reaching that point, where you fully understand the possibilities of the evidence, and the different ways it could be applied to a solution) without any assistance whatsoever. But it's an indie game, so that doesn't bother me as much as it otherwise might
The lack of settings surprised me; luckily, the mouse sensitively was okay for me, though.
There's a fair amount of critiques there, but I'm still going to recommend the game; I'm not really the type to leave a review on a game if it doesn't feel worth my time. I've played many mystery/puzzle/detective games, and I know these reviews can really help fellow sleuths decide if a particular game is for them or not, based on preferences of the genre.
I would definitely play another game by the same developers, and recommend others give it a shot, if you're looking for a new puzzle game after getting through most of the well-known options out there.
TLDR; it's a solid first(?) major game that got a lot right, but the pay-off is weakened by the game's reliance on inductive reasoning for its solutions.

Fun and fairly open-ended! The voice acting felt a bit superfluous, but other than that this is a pretty neat little game that leaves a lot of the thinking up to you. Stylistically it's pretty reminiscent of Scene Investigators and Painscreek Killings, but as it only covers one case in a smaller environment, it ends up feeling a bit tighter (positive). If you like this kind of puzzling, you'll probably enjoy this game too!

full disclosure, i first convicted the supposed killer using my entire own information (my hand hurts from writing). After I found out i was wrong, I looked over my evidence again for an hour and convicted another person. That was also wrong. Then I used a walkthrough to get me to the actual culprit.

**TL;DR game good, buy it for a fantastic detective experience.** If you want to read why I think the actual solution is not a great one, read on. The solution makes sense if you can get over that mental stretch, but I have significant problems with said stretch. Otherwise, you should buy the game and play it, because it's quite lovely. I too liked the game, but I think the actual solution kinda takes a leap in logic.

**NO SPOILERS**

i convicted someone who i completely thought to be the actual killer, and once i realized i was wrong, i went through other people's explanations of why. And I actually completely understand why as well, because there were some inconsistencies that popped up once I was on the warpath to convict this one person. So fair enough.

But no matter how I thought about it, the actual killer is very off to me. Without spoiling who, it's not super likely that they were able to do what they did without accomplice(s), because (imo) them getting away with the kill entirely hinges on one or more people, (all of) who (once again, imo) have been established to not like Ruth but not to the point of "i want her to die and her killer to get away". As those person(s) were seeing what the killer was doing, it would be BLATANTLY OBVIOUS to them that the killer was guilty. I didn't like that part at all, because I could've sworn this was a Scream-style situation. This is not spoilers: you cannot convict more than one person. And the accomplice(s) set up AND turned a blind eye to the kill well enough to the point that you would be well within your rights to throw the book at them. Also, considering the accomplice(s) and the killer, their testimonies would be so untrustworthy that it makes everything they say go up in the air, including where they were and what their status was like and so on and so forth.

(MOSTLY OPINION) You are also expected to use the profile created for the solution. I did not like that. Profiling has been LONG established to be bunk because it creates a "likely" psychological profile of whoever the kill is based on pretty much whatever the profiler feels like. Likely, as in 51% correct. Even recently, the FBI's profiling method has only worked 56% of the time (2019). (Actual prosecutors wouldn't dare to rely on profiles in court btw, the defense just has to bring up an expert witness psychologist of their own who testifies the entire practice is bunk and that line of argument gets thrown out the window) Considering the game's recent release, I completely disregarded the profile because I assumed the devs would be full cognizant of that, but all indications point to them having the player rely on it to confirm your answer. :/ (MOSTLY OPINION)

I'm also not a huge fan of the logic surrounding the guns and bullets. That piece of the puzzle relies on you realizing that "hey something is wrong with a piece of evidence in front of me", but a descriptor of that piece of evidence makes it entirely possible that it's just as likely because of when YOU (the investigator) examine the case. You are not investigating this case immediately or even soon after the case: you are examining it YEARS after.


Those are my major problems with the solution. The rest are nitpicks that just kinda snowballed, as follows below:

How was John/Jane Doe's fingerprints on the wallet? more specifically, why?

John/Jane Doe's testimony describes the killer in a certain way and according to the top walkthrough on Steam you are supposed to rely on that as more evidence. I can call my sister a homicidal maniac who likes eating chicken raw and that would be as reliable as what John/Jane Doe called the killer here.

All of the suspects are familiar with guns and the woods, so those were kinda pointless.

TBH, I just completely threw out all of what the detectives said about the suspects' motives because look, the murderer was motivated because he/she/they wanted to be a clown when they wanted to grow up but Ruth called them an idiot. I too as an unqualified professional can speculate based on circumstantial evidence about the motives of criminals. I am entirely unsure if the devs wanted me to rely on those or not.


**ONCE AGAIN**: I like this game. I recommend with a hearty thumbs up. Just wanted to note some problems I had with the actual solution, but I can see why it's the solution if your mind works differently. Buy this game, fully recommend.

I really wished I liked this game more because it definitely has potential. Unfortunately this game has many frustrating mechanics that turn what would've been an interesting mystery into a constant game of trial and error, only you don't get a second chance.
First, the descriptions of two of the tests are very vague and it wasn't until I looked at a guide that I realized how to use them. I was surprised by how much I missed my first time because the game couldn't be bothered to tell me how to use one of the main features of the game. Even after getting it wrong multiple times, I thought the CSI girl would correct me, but instead she just talks about pointless things.
Also, I really wish you could connect evidence to each other, like in Shadow of a Doubt. You can only move the string of yarn from a suspect to a piece of evidence, which is harder than you'd think because you have to click the string at exactly the right place and connect it to something on the opposite side of the board while your mouse sensitivity is through the roof. There are no options to move evidence around so you end up having a dozen strings stretching across the board, potentially blocking your view of something important. Once again, it makes it extremely hard to connect evidence when you have half a dozen strings going across a piece of paper.
Overall, I liked the game, but I highly recommend you look at the guide on here to teach you about the mechanics of the game. It also does a good job of helping you narrow down the suspect without spoiling anything. I got the killer wrong twice and I probably wouldn't have figured it out without the guide talking me through it since there's no quick and easy way to sort through evidence and clues.

I can recommend this game... but barely. I likely wouldn't if there were more games in the investigation genre.
The game's got an interesting mystery, and understanding what our six suspects did on the fateful day is fun. This is enough for me to recommend it.
However, the game has three downsides.
Aside from reading documents, the main mechanic is analyzing physical proofs. It's cool, but each proof can be analyzed in many ways, and you're only allowed three ways per proof, with some slightly out there decisions. This means you can just miss the incriminating proof, rendering your whole investigation somewhat pointless.
There is an evidence board. It seems fun, until you realise you can't organize it, and the game organizes it randomly (just fills a random slot with each proof). This makes it very hard to understand. To the point I got a "bad" end the first time I played the game because I didn't realize documents placed under other
larger documents were not linked to the main suspect. In general, it's also pretty clunky as a mechanic.
I found the (true) end pretty unsatisfying.