Detective Case and Clown Bot in: The Express Killer

My soft spot for small-studio adventure games has gotten me into trouble before, and The Express Killer is precisely the kind of game that tests that loyalty. Portuguese developer Nerd Monkeys built this sequel around a genuinely funny premise: grumpy, alcoholic Detective Justin Case and his joke-dispensing floating robot sidekick Clown Bot board a Lisbon-to-Porto express train to catch a serial killer, all while reluctantly babysitting a kid named Billy. The setup alone carries more personality than most indie pitches manage in a full trailer. Mechanically, this is old-school point-and-click orthodoxy rooted in the 80s and 90s tradition - cursor-hunting across train compartments, picking up inventory items, and interrogating a cast of passengers who range from eccentric to deeply strange. The interrogation system deserves a mention because it adds genuine texture: once you have gathered enough evidence on a suspect, you enter a simplified back-and-forth sequence inspired loosely by L.A. Noire, choosing the right question from a short list and pairing it with the correct inventory item to "crack" them. As pressure mounts the suspects grow more animated and the music ratchets up in intensity, and the final reveal of the killer is genuinely hard to predict without some lateral thinking. The three additional side cases bundled in pad out the runtime without feeling like filler. The original soundtrack, mixing classical orchestra with modern rock, is the brightest single achievement here - it punches considerably above the game's budget in ways that keep the atmosphere alive even when the puzzles feel thin. The problems are real and worth naming plainly. Pixel hunting is a persistent drag - the game runs at a native 256x192 resolution, the same used by the old ZX Spectrum 48k, which is a lovely aesthetic choice that also means interactive objects can be genuinely difficult to locate without methodical cursor-dragging. The English localization, while clearly a labor of love, still carries rough edges: some dialogue is confusing enough to obscure what characters actually want from you, and a handful of exchanges read as tone-deaf in ways the developers almost certainly did not intend. Clown Bot's defining character trait - bad jokes landing with mechanical timing - works better in concept than execution, because the jokes are uniformly bad rather than selectively, knowingly bad. The humor overall is scattershot: some gags land with real warmth, others clunk, and the relentless surrealism eventually starts to feel like a defense mechanism rather than a creative choice. Who is this for? Players who grew up with LucasArts or early Sierra adventures and want something short, weird, and made with obvious affection for the genre will find enough here to justify the time. At roughly 4-6 hours for the main case plus side content, it never outstays its welcome. New players do not need the first game to follow the story - the developers confirmed it was designed as a standalone entry. Just go in knowing the rough edges are structural, not incidental, and that the charm is genuine even when the craft is uneven.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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