Fortunately for us, Nicalis has remedied that and released Touch Detective 3 + The Complete Case Files for the Nintendo Switch (we’ll just call it Touch Detective 3 though). That means it’s time for a whole new generation to discover Mackenzie and her friends and for some of us older gamers to finally get a chance to play the third entry in the series a mere decade after its original release on the 3DS.
Those of you familiar with the series will already be aware of this, but the Touch Detective trilogy is a traditional point and click style mystery game. The interface is reminiscent of old-school PC games of the same style, such as Lucasarts titles. If you’re looking for something more modern, best look elsewhere because this is as traditional as it gets and some players are turned off by this rather opaque style of gaming.
In the Touch Detective Trilogy, you control Mackenzie, a young girl who is pursuing a career as a detective. She’s assisted by a butler (and possibly vampire) named Cromwell and the mysteries she solves are rather…nonstandard. You’re on the case hunting down missing bananas and stolen dreams for a start. Instead of detailing each game, it will make more sense to approach the trilogy as a whole in this case because there are only a handful of differences between the first two games and the third, mostly saving options and a few other small items.
Each Touch Detective game provides you with a series of cases. Solve one case and you can move on to the next until you complete the game. The first game consists of four main cases as well as some bonus investigations. The second game has five cases, a number of bonus investigations, some minigames, and even a jukebox. The new third game also consists of five cases and a set of bonus investigations. This time around, you’re hunting fungi coins as well which you can use to win prizes.
The Touch Detective trilogy is chock full of weird things to find and even weirder people to talk to. Aside from solving the “mysteries” surrounding Mackenzie and her friends, you’ll also be…um…searching for things to touch. Mackenzie likes to touch objects in her environment, react to how they feel, and document the information in her journal. It’s a strange thing to do and some of the things she says while doing it are even stranger, but the games are called Touch Detective for a reason!
Assuming you’re not familiar with point-and-click games, especially the older style ones, prepare to be patient. The Touch Detective trilogy expects you to go, talk to people, figure out what to do next, and pay attention to hints people give you. They won’t say some things twice and if you lose track of what you’re supposed to do, there’s no help available. There’s a clue function in Touch Detective 3, but it doesn’t always work the best, leaving you floundering if you can’t figure out what you’ve missed. Much like the Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy (review here), you cannot progress in an investigation in Touch Detective without talking to the right person, examining the right item in the right way, or visiting the correct place and searching the correct area. However, there is no way to tell what you can interact with in any given screen so you’re left clicking on things and in places that might trigger something if you’re lucky. Sure, you get told what to do next but if you step away for a day or two and forget what someone said you might be in trouble.
Once you interact with the right person/object/area, the story progresses and you are allowed to continue, sometimes leading to a short cinema sequence but typically just giving you more to do until the end of the investigation. This is a very linear series of games that really doesn’t give a lot of creative leeway in problem solving and the cases and people are so odd that it can be hard to intuit what to do next. This leads you to wander through areas repeatedly talking to everyone and clicking on things in order to try and progress if you get stumped. Fortunately the games are so old that there are plenty of walkthroughs online but if you’re determined to do it all on your own, make sure you pay attention!
Aside from figuring out what exactly to do to move things along, there aren’t very many challenges in Touch Detective 3, or for that matter the entire series. Clicking on things to review how they feel or find coins isn’t hard and you don’t have to solve any puzzles like in the Professor Layton games. You just enjoy the quirkiness of the overall design of the Touch Detective games, giggle at the irreverent stories, and move on. That’s not a bad thing but once you’ve done everything there is to do, there’s not a lot of replayability here.
By now you’ve got an idea how strange and madcap the Touch Detective series can be so let’s talk about the visuals. This is a game that channels some serious ‘90s goth vibes. The design work could easily be out of a discarded Tim Burton storyboard or some strange kawaii fusion of maid cafes and X-Files. It’s hard to pin down the style of the Touch Detective trilogy but it’s definitely unique. Funghi, Mackenzie’s anthropomorphic fungus assistant/pet was actually so popular in Japan that there are spin-off games and a significant amount of merchandising. In fact, buying Touch Detective 3 + The Complete Case Files direct from Nicalis nets you a sweet Funghi plushy which is delightfully obscure and strangely compelling. Let’s not look too deep into that though, shall we?
While the design work is amazing, the visuals in the Touch Detective trilogy are a bit different. These are portable games released over 15 years ago on the DS and 3DS mind you, but unlike other recent compilations, they still look old. The recently released Etrian Odyssey Origins Collection (review here) showed us what updated HD versions of old DS games can look like and it was fantastic. Touch Detective 3 on the other hand looks like it was simply picked up from the low resolution DS screen and plopped onto the Switch. All three games present in standard definition in a small window, maintaining the aspect ratio of the original DS games. Visuals are fuzzy and poorly defined, a definite disappointment considering the clever character design work in the series. Each game is surrounded by an HD border that can be changed at the touch of a button and there are plenty of borders but the game itself looks remarkably old. That’s not ideal for a modern release of a beloved obscure cult classic franchise.
While the visuals aren’t ideal by any means, the sound is well-preserved on the Touch Detective games and just as weird and quirky as the game itself. Dynamic themes and weird, boppy tracks are interspersed depending on the action going on at the time. These shifts in tone and tempo based fit right in with the strange designs of the game, elevating the experience to something even more offbeat than a traditional soundtrack. That’s definitely a good thing and the sound effects that accompany gameplay manage to enhance things even further. While it might not be a soundtrack you’d rush to buy, it definitely fits the gameplay in all three games and there are a few tracks that become pretty solid earworms too.
Last but not least there are the controls. The Touch Detective trilogy is a touch based game and converts well to the Switch touchscreen. If you’re playing undocked, You can easily control the game entirely with your finger, tapping on where you want to go and what you’d like to interact with. While it’s reasonably responsive, if you have large fingers (like some of us), Mackenzie might not do exactly what you’d like her to every time. Without screen cues, it’s also hard to figure out what to interact with, leaving a lot of random tapping on things for no purpose. In docked mode, the stick controls a hand cursor that allows you to highlight and select interactions. It’s easier to select specific objects than the touch screen is but the cursor moves fairly slowly which can be equally frustrating.
With 14 cases to solve, a bunch of additional investigations to pursue, and a range of hidden interactions to discover and minigames to play, Touch Detective 3 + The Complete Case Files is a robust collection of unique point and click adventures that will have you scratching your head and touching things for hours and hours. If you’ve played the originals, it’s time to play the official translation of the third game and if not, this will be an odd but engaging experience. While it’s great that the complete series has finally been released domestically, it’s a bit of a shame that the visuals haven’t been given a new coat of paint and that there isn’t anything else new to add to the original releases. Aside from that however, it’s a great deal for a solid amount of content, especially at only $40. All that’s left is for you to wander around touching things and making vague statements about them! Tally ho and good luck!
This review is based on a digital copy of Touch Detective 3 + The Complete Case Files provided by the publisher. It was played on a Nintendo Switch in both docked and undocked modes and played equally well on both. Touch Detective 3 + The Complete Case Files is a Nintendo Switch exclusive.
Nate Van Lindt has been a gamer since the days of yore (aka Commodore 64), and has played a bit of virtually everything out there. He's also an avid comic book collector, both vintage and current, and reads a fair amount of sci-fi and fantasy. On top of that, he watches a fair number of movies and TV shows as well. Oh, and he has a family, a full-time job, and lives somewhere in the urban wilds of Southwestern Ontario, Canada, foraging for old video cables and forgotten game soundtracks.