Detective Case and Clown Bot in: Murder in the Hotel Lisbon

My first impression of this one was that somebody in Lisbon had genuinely loved LucasArts games as a kid and decided to build a love letter to that era at native ZX Spectrum resolution, pixel by careful pixel. That instinct is mostly right, and it matters. Nerd Monkeys built Murder in the Hotel Lisbon in Game Maker Studio rather than the adventure-game-studio defaults everyone reaches for, and the result has an idiosyncratic handmade quality that bigger productions iron out completely. The game presents itself as a stage production, complete with curtains, a visible crowd, and a five-act structure, which gives even the silliest scenes a theatrical framing that I found quietly endearing. The central mechanic separates this from the usual point-and-click crowd. Rather than combining arbitrary inventory items, all collected objects function as pieces of evidence to be matched against interrogation questions. Each interview runs three rounds, and you choose which protagonist conducts it: the aggressively rude Detective Justin Case, or the calm, logic-driven Clown Bot. Some suspects only crack under one character's approach, so reading the room is part of the puzzle. It is a thoughtful rework of the classic "ASK SOMEONE ABOUT SOMETHING" text adventure verb, even if the execution occasionally stumbles. Getting the right answer but using the wrong interviewer means replaying the whole scene from the start, and that friction can sour an otherwise breezy session. Beyond the main case, there are three optional side quests that open up additional locations and story threads, plus a standalone Stand-Up Clown minigame where you play as the bot completing joke setups, which is genuinely funny in small doses. The soundtrack deserves a paragraph of its own. Composed by Rafael Pina and recorded with live instruments, the chiptune-adjacent jazz score loops seamlessly and carries a warmth the rest of the game sometimes strains to match. When the hunt for the right evidence combination starts to drag, the music keeps the atmosphere buoyant. The pixel art follows ZX Spectrum constraints deliberately, and the character designs are expressive within those limits. Audio quality outside the music is rougher, with crowd and ambient sounds occasionally overwhelming the mix. Where the game gets complicated is the humor. The jokes range from absurdist and genuinely clever to risque and, depending on your tolerance, outright off-putting. Portuguese comedy sensibility translates imperfectly into English, and the localization has visible seams. Some players will giggle through the whole thing; others will bounce off it early. The writing is also the source of minor sequencing bugs, where conversations trigger slightly out of order, and early builds had crash reports in the final act. The Steam version has received patches over the years, so the worst of those issues appear resolved, but a few rough edges remain. Movement is slow by default, though Clown Bot's taxi fast-travel mitigates most of the backtracking across the Hotel Lisbon, the police station, and the handful of connecting locations. At three to five hours depending on how thoroughly you explore, this game knows its length. It does not overstay. That matters enormously to me: a short game that ends cleanly is worth more than a bloated one that loses the thread. Murder in the Hotel Lisbon has a genuine twist ending and a character dynamic, the bickering odd-couple of Case and the joke-obsessed robot, that I would happily follow into the sequel. If you are the kind of person who genuinely misses the Monkey Island era and can forgive a small team's rougher edges, this is a quiet little thing worth your evening.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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