Hauma - A Detective Noir Story review: Indiana Jones meets visual novel meets ridiculous cop show
One of my favourite TV shows is The Rookie, because you never have any idea what could happen next. No episode can go more than five minutes without some kind of twist, often with no relation to anything that has happened up until that point. Like, you think the stand-off between criminals and their victims in a courthouse nuclear bunker has been resolved, but it turns out that while the camera was off him, a lawyer got stabbed by someone else. Hauma is bringing that kind of energy to the visual novel space.
You play as Judith, a former detective and champion boxer who's wrapped up in solving the case her grandfather was working on before he died. On its face, Hauma is therefore a detective game in a pretty cool 2D comic book-style, with a slightly worse version of the Frogwares Sherlock Holmes mind palace as your inventory of clues, which you combine to logic your way through puzzles. But at the point where you're in a tunnel under the ruins of a Nazi temple in Munich, having discovered that the MacGuffin is a shin bone carved with the recipe for an eternal life drink (which was stolen by some nuns and taken to Bavaria, and then the nuns all got pregnant I guess?) - and, secondly, having recently survived a massive explosion at an Oktoberfest beer tent - you kind of think, well, things have gotten quite out of hand, haven't they?