Touch Detective is a cute point-and-click game that’s big on charm and short on compelling game play. Although I absolutely adored the character designs and the game’s overall quirky humor, the stories were humdrum at best. To top it off, several of the later chapters suffered from having nearly inscrutable objectives that had me walking in circles tapping everything in sight in the hopes of finding and activating whatever it was that I needed in order to progress the storyline.

Aside from the sometimes frustratingly obtuse objectives, the game just never seemed to go anywhere. With only four main story chapters and one bonus episode that amounts to little more than a prolonged series of fetch quests, Touch Detective lacks both longevity and replayability. I realize that this is a problem that plagues the point-and-click genre as a whole, but it’s particularly bad in Touch Detective since the plots are mediocre at best. In fact, the only chapter I really enjoyed was the one about a stranded snow fairy that needed Mackenzie’s help in order to go home. That story had a sweet charm and my favorite character, Chloe, played a major role. With her over-caffeinated antics and immature logic, I always got a good laugh out of any scene that Chloe was involved in.

As I mentioned earlier, I absolutely adored the character designs for Touch Detective. Every major character oozed with personality, which made the bland zombie-like designs of the far less important NPC characters seem strangely hilarious by comparison. Unfortunately, the game definitely suffers from a lack of variety, especially when it comes to map locations. You only visit six different locations throughout the whole game. Sure, each location contains a few different mini-areas you can explore, but there’s so little interaction with the static backgrounds that is just gets very boring after a while.

Bottom Line:
Touch Detective is a cute, but occasionally frustrating game who’s only real saving grace is its humor and memorable art style. There’s little to no replay value to be had upon completion, so unless your collector of Atlus games (like me), you’ll be better of renting it for the weekend rather than buying.

Final Score: 3 out of 5 Stars
Reviewed by: LC1
Review Format: Nintendo DS