Duppy Detective Tashia Review

Developed and published by Spritewrench, Duppy Detective Tashia is a quite short point-and-click adventure game following a young woman named Tashia who winds up trapped in the Halfway Market, a space where Caribbean spirits and ghosts, called duppy, reside. However, just as she arrives, an archangel named Michael (or Mikey for short) tells her there's been a murder: Anansi the trickster spider has been found dead. Tashia then takes it upon herself to solve the case, becoming a duppy detective in the hopes that doing so will convince Mikey to send her back to the land of the living.

What follows is a rather simple series of five episodes where you look at a map of the Halfway Market and click on each location to either have a brief chat with the duppy standing there or investigate it for clues. Where you need to go is pretty obvious, outside of one frustrating sequence in episode two, and while you're given a bunch of tasks right off the bat, solving them is pretty linear, too. The whole experience is short; it took me, notorious long-time-taker that I am, about an hour and a half to complete on my first run, and about half an hour on my second.

The characters themselves are all interesting, with the duppy having fun designs that offer a mix between their traditional portrayals and a more human look. Additionally, while surface-level internet "research" tells me duppy are usually seen as harmful, Duppy Detective Tashia's variants are more friendly and sassy — though there is still a murderer among them.

Admittedly, while the character design is strong and easy to love, everyone only seems to have one sprite of their full art each. In dialogue, their different emotions are represented by chibi versions of the cast's heads and by Animal Crossing–style gibberish sounds. It's cute, but a bit disappointing, especially as Tashia herself has incredibly expressive sprites when on her own or investigating — her thinking pose and neutral dead stare fit her youthful and foolhardy personality perfectly. I would have loved seeing the rest of the cast get as much detail.

The dialogue likewise has its ups and downs, being both hilarious and sloppy. There are many fun jokes thrown around by the cast as they try and fail to convince Tashia of their dubious innocence, and the way the cast's thick accents are represented, all phonetically written out, helps to keep the mood casual and fun. However, that same technique also seems to have given the writing credence to ignore punctuation and grammar. I admit, I don't know much about Caribbean dialects, and so am willing to forgive what looks like odd grammar from a solo Jamaican developer, but there are a couple of lines I found hard to parse and many instances where punctuation was missing.

When you're not talking to people, there are also a few items to find and inspect; rather than merely clicking on them once to learn everything you need or selecting notable details as in other games, here Tashia must take in each clue with all five of her senses (not really all of them, mind, but who doesn't want to lick a smelly piece of abandoned fabric) to get to the bottom of the case. There are some neat interactions here, like how tasting candy will make Tashia just eat the dang thing, removing it from your inventory, though you can't actually miss any details, as the game won't let you progress past an item until you've found everything.

Then, at the end of each episode, everyone gets together at the Market Meeting, where Tashia must choose the culprit and recommend that they be banished. Sadly, there's not really much room for puzzling things out, as Duppy Detective Tashia only truly allows you to point at a small handful of suspects at any given meeting, and whoever you don't pick suddenly loses a lot of their characterisation and pronouns, so the story can go on unchanged. Overall, for being a mystery, neither the player nor Tashia herself actually get a chance to figure much out of substance, especially as each episode feels the need to end on multiple characters who could conceivably be the culprit.

Beyond all that, Duppy Detective Tashia is also a fair bit broken behind the curtain. It's still being updated pretty frequently, but in my run two weeks after release… I got notifications that I'd learned something new when repeating old dialogue or investigations, I had to go through inspecting items a second time when I revisited the two locations that gives you a temporary item, text bars repeated on me or disappeared entirely, the wrong character sprites appeared, one whole sequence in the game's ending started over from the beginning, Tashia claimed she'd banished someone that never even got banished, and when I tried to return to the main menu mid-game, nothing happened. It's a lot.

Overall, I found Duppy Detective Tashia to be a tiresome experience; it felt like the game was punishing me for returning to places I'd been before and wanted to be over soon. Even the music (while charming, bouncy, and tropical) felt repetitive, like a waiting room that wants to seem chill. I want to like it because the characters are fun from their looks to their words, but it just doesn't have anything special enough about it to make up for the lack of polish. My fingers are crossed that future updates can at least make up for that.