MeiQi 2020

I want to root for MeiQi 2020. There is something genuinely rare about a solo developer who has been quietly building a detective universe across multiple seasons, year after year, rebuilding old mobile chapters in Unreal Engine 5 and releasing them episodically on Steam because he simply wants the work to be better. That ambition deserves to be seen, and for a certain kind of player it absolutely will be. The structure is straightforward once you understand it: this collection gathers Seasons 2 through 5 of the Sun Meiqi mystery series, plus a special episode, totalling 25 planned chapters. Each chapter runs roughly an hour, and they are designed to be self-contained enough to play in any order while feeding into a larger, serialised story centred on detective Liu Qingchun in 1990s Beijing. The core loop is first-person scene exploration, physical clue collection, and a deduction-correlation system where you pin evidence together to advance the plot. Cases unfold across carefully dressed locations - cramped residential compounds, temples, guest houses, transit spaces - all soaked in the specific texture of Chinese everyday life from that era. The atmosphere QZQ Studio reaches for here is less hardboiled procedural and more quiet dread, a micro-horror sensibility that seeps through ordinary objects and lived-in rooms rather than jump-scare theatrics. The honest caveat is that MeiQi 2020 is still in Early Access, and the Steam user score sits at a mixed 40% from a small sample. The Early Access premise is that chapters are remade and released one at a time, which means the 25-chapter total is a roadmap, not a current reality. If incomplete content frustrates you, this is genuinely not your moment. The developer is a single person, he says so plainly, and asks players to tolerate rough edges - weak in-game guidance, occasional plot reorganisation mid-development, pacing that can feel uneven between chapters. Those are real limitations, not cosmetic ones. The reasoning puzzles lack the hand-holding a Western mystery game might offer, which will either feel refreshing or leave you stuck. Where this earns genuine affection is in the specificity of its world-building. The 1990s Chinese setting is not window dressing. Objects, spaces, and social texture carry meaning that players from that cultural context will find quietly moving, and outsiders will find intriguingly foreign. The series has been running continuously for years across nine-plus seasons, which tells you the developer finishes what he starts - that consistency matters when you are buying into an unfinished product. Other entries in the franchise, like MeiQi 2022, have landed at mostly positive ratings with a larger review base, suggesting the series gets more confident as it matures. MeiQi 2020 is the entry point for the earliest chapters of that universe, rebuilt for PC, still mid-construction. Buy it as a fan of serialised mystery fiction who accepts the rhythm of episodic drip-release. Approach it the way you would a small-press detective novel that ships one chapter at a time: the pleasure is in returning, not in bingeing.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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