Cold Verdict started off grabbing my interest with it’s story. I’m a sucker for seemingly random people waking up together and having to pieceCold Verdict started off grabbing my interest with it’s story. I’m a sucker for seemingly random people waking up together and having to piece together a puzzle. The longer the game went on though the more of my interest got lost. It seemed like some pretty thin reasons to have these people together and when it came time for the ending I was even more surprised at who got to live and die. It just didn’t make much sense to me given what had been revealed. The characters themselves weren’t all that interesting at times. They felt a little wooden in their dialogue, too much straight business talk without much emotion. Although Landon had the opposite issue. Also Dean didn’t get very much to do compared to the rest. There are a decent amount of choices you can make and they can change the story a bit. The art was alright for the people themselves but the environment and objects felt a little low resolution and lacking detail.
I played Cold Verdict on Linux. I happened to try to run Cold Verdict on my system that uses Linux Mint 20.3 and found it just crashed at launch. No error and nothing in the log file. It does however run outside of Steam by running the executable itself as well as it runs fine on my Manjaro system using the Steam launcher so that is how I played the game. It never crashed on me on my Manjaro system. I didn’t notice any other bugs or glitches. You can manually save whenever you want and there are 54 save slots. Alt-Tab didn’t work.
Game Engine: Ren’Py 7.4.8.1895
Game Version Played: 1.0
Graphics API: OpenGL
Disk Space Used: 670 MB
GPU Usage: 1-15 %
VRAM Usage: 740-1620 MB
CPU Usage: 2-14 %
RAM Usage: 2.6-2.9 GB
Overall I wouldn’t call Cold Verdict a bad game but I also can’t call it a great one. The dialogue could have used some work as well as the plot and art. I have played far worse visual novels but also far better. I paid $4.20 CAD for it and felt the price was fine. I finished my first play through in 55 minutes.
My System:
AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | MSI RX 580 8GB Gaming X | Mesa 21.3.2 | Manjaro 21.2.1 | Mate 1.26.0 | Kernel 5.15.12-1-MANJARO… Expand