15 Days

I wanted to love 15 Days. The premise genuinely hooked me: three Robin Hood-style activists, Cathryn, Mike, and Bernard, running art heists across the world's great museums, funneling the proceeds to charity, and eventually stumbling into a proper political conspiracy involving a murdered British Foreign Secretary and a stolen portrait of Cecil Rhodes. That setup deserves a tight, atmospheric thriller. What House of Tales delivered instead is a game that feels like it was assembled in a hurry and shipped before anyone finished checking the seams. The structure leans hard toward interactive movie territory rather than traditional point-and-click puzzling. You spend most of your time walking between locations looking for a next trigger, and the game's own label for its mini-challenges, listed in the UI as "mindgames," tells you a lot about how seriously the design takes player agency. There are a handful of genuinely clever moments: lining up laser beams to let Cathryn slip past museum security, a compass-and-map sequence in the Paris catacombs, some signal-synchronization work that at least asks your brain to show up. But these are islands in a sea of empty room traversal. Items appear in your inventory right when the plot needs them rather than when you actually pick them up, a design shortcut that drains any satisfaction from exploration. Dialogue interactions collapse to a single icon click rather than a branching conversation tree, which would be acceptable in a shorter, punchier game but feels stingy here across a seven-to-eight-hour runtime. The voice performances have some warmth, and the relationship between the three thieves carries a lived-in quality that occasionally makes you care where this is all going. The Cougar engine, which House of Tales also used in Overclocked, delivers pre-rendered backgrounds with real cinematic movement: tracking shots and pans that give a few scenes genuine visual flair. When the atmosphere clicks, there are small pockets of the espionage thriller the game wanted to be. The problem is that those pockets are interrupted by technical instability that never fully went away even after the Steam release patched out the most egregious crash triggers. Certain in-game browser searches still destabilise the experience, and the story resolves in a way that generous reviewers might call abrupt. Context matters here. Reports from the original release period suggest the game was shaped by a rushed development schedule and significant studio upheaval, with founding members departing during production. That history is visible in the final product: 15 Days reads like a project that lost its creative centre partway through and had its rougher edges shipped rather than sanded. If you approach it as a curio from a German adventure studio that showed real promise in its earlier work, there is archaeology to be done. If you approach it wanting a satisfying mystery adventure, the gap between the premise and the delivery will frustrate you more than the puzzles ever will.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

Be the first to comment on 15 Days.