As you read this, you may be wondering what time it is. Let me answer that for you, IT’S CRIME O’CLOCK! Crime time, if you will. If you have ever wanted to be Jean Claude Van Damme in the classic film Time Cop or participate in a sort of reverse Minority Report, then Crime O’Clock is the game for you!
Crime O’Clock is a hidden object game with a lot of added bells and whistles. It’s Where’s Waldo? from the future. You are part of a time police force, and it’s your job to put the timeline right when crimes that shouldn’t have happened occur. Along the way, you are guided by an AI that is GLADOS and Sandra Bullock from Demolition Man combined, who is simultaneously annoyed and trying to do the best job.
With the help of your AI systems’ various subroutines and time-traveling abilities, it’s up to you to hop between time periods and discover what is corrupting the timeline. Initially, it seems like it will be a relatively straightforward assignment, but not long after learning the ropes, it becomes apparent that something bigger is happening to the timeline, and whatever it is, it’s happening all over the place. Your computer companion dubs it The Nexus Event to make things seem sinister.
Crime O’Clock Feels Like An Easter Egg-Filled Version of Where’s Waldo?
It’s pretty hard to make things seem sinister, though. Crime O’Clock takes place in what I can only describe as “The Arthur-Verse,” which, as we all know, is the universe where the supposed Aardvark Arthur and his human-animal hybrid brethren reside. To be fair, the game isn’t trying to be actually sinister. It’s just quite funny in the context of the environments you are combing through.
This brings us to how you actually play the game. Each setting is a static picture, basically like a Where’s Waldo? scene. (extreme sidenote – it’s called Where’s Wally? in the UK, and it is deeply weird to refer to him as Waldo.) Once you arrive at this static time slice, you must find the victim. Your mega-powerful, time-traveling computer knows a crime has happened but not what or who to. I played on Nintendo Switch, meaning I could play handheld, making it easier to investigate as I scrolled through and zoomed in on the images.
Once you locate the victim, it’s time to reconstruct the events leading to the crime. You do this through Ticks, which are ten set points in time before, during, and after the crime is committed. You hop back and forth into these snapshots of time and follow characters, clues, and physical manifestations of extreme emotions to a conclusion. As you discover things, they get scrawled on the timeline and stay in place so that you can remember critical clues as you scour the scene. You also have a handy journal to remind you of what you’ve found and what you are looking for.
Within your investigations, there are also various subroutines that your AI can implement to help you out. These subroutines are small mini puzzles like creating an identikit of a person of interest, reconstructing broken objects, or deciphering documents. I say mini puzzles; they aren’t very puzzling. They generally involve selecting things and shifting them until it all goes together. Not particularly taxing, but a nice break from intently searching for a bird-man in the pyramids.
One of the things I really appreciate about Crime O’Clock is the details. Of course, these types of seek-and-find or hidden-object games need to have busy, crowded environments, but the real challenge comes in making the environments interesting. What made Where’s Waldo? so popular and enduring was the intricacy of the scenes, the recognizable characters, and the silly details and mini-stories that popped onto the page. Crime O’Clock does this very well.
The Attention To Detail In Crime O’Clock Is Very Impressive
It’s no small feat to create these multi-layered still scenes, let alone at least ten different variations of them. The artists have also inserted roughly a billion little easter eggs into each scene. Pop culture references and small stories can be followed alongside your goal of crime-solving. They have nothing to do with your mission; they are just small delights that target the very specific ADHD/Autism splotches of my brain.
John Wick and his dog can be found wandering the city. Brendan Fraser’s character Rick can be seen confronting The Mummy. There’s an allusion to Guns and Roses playing a concert. The cast of Stargate and the Stargates themselves pop up; you get the picture. This is all only in the first two time periods you visit, and it’s also only a small sampling of little details scattered throughout time.
Whenever I spotted a reference, my brain went “click-ding!” because that is how I’m wired. A small dab of delicious serotonin was released with every easter egg uncovered. Is this the point of the game? Nope, but it’s clearly an intended factor for those of us whose brains lock on to things and have too many overflowing pockets of pop culture knowledge.
Wrapping Up
The mysteries themselves are a fun journey through different story angles. Uncovering the sequence of events is satisfying and well thought out, and the overall “save the timeline” storyline has been done before, but Crime O’Clock puts an inventive twist on things. It can sometimes feel a little slow with the back-and-forth through scenes, and in truth, the subroutine mini-puzzles really add nothing to the gameplay. For them to actually add something, they would need to be a little more involved. I get the impression they are there to offer eye breaks from the scene scouring but play wise, they are unnecessary. Jean Claude Van Damme said in the magnum opus that is Time Cop that “There is never enough time,” but in Crime O’Clock, it is sometimes too much, but at least it’s fun.
Crime O’Clock is out now on Nintendo Switch, PC, and Mac.
