Second verse, reasonably similar to the first.
Suspects is a card based mystery game that involves visiting locations, speaking to suspects, and examining items to try to unravel the secrets behind a crime. Claire Harper, Eternal Investigator is the second collection in this series and includes three separate cases.
I enjoyed the first Suspects game, Claire Harper Takes the Stage, despite not doing particularly great solving its cases. They required catching little details, and were generally harder than other games of this type I’ve played. But it was still a well crafted game and quite fun and I was looking forward to the sequels.
Eternal Investigator provides a deeper look at the protagonist introduced in the previous collection. She’s the thread tying the cases together and this group features different times in her life.
The game plays extremely similar to the first with a deck of cards driving the gameplay with information to uncover as the cases proceed. Each case has a couple extra things to go with the deck that help frame the investigation and present initial leads to follow. Things that can be investigated are numbered and drawing the corresponding cards is how the game proceeds. It’s extremely open in letting the players decide what order to poke at things at, although at times certain mechanics hold parts of the investigation back a bit until certain progress has been made.
With the mechanics out of the way the main question is how good the cases are. In the end it’s rather hard to compare this to the first set. I again played solo, did a little better, and for the most part enjoyed these. But while one of my favorite cases in the series was here, my absolute least favorite case in any of the Suspects series was here too (including the third collection, review to come). I won’t get into spoilers but I felt it just didn’t come together and unlike all the other cases relied a bit on educated guesses (which mysteries never should).
Playing the cases in order makes sense as it progresses through Claire’s life, but they most definitely ARE NOT in progressing difficulty. The game’s fully resettable and can be passed along to others after playing.
Overall I enjoy and recommend the series and with one really good case and one solid one out of three the good still outweighs the less so in this collection. Far from perfect but still well worth checking out if you enjoyed the first batch.
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