Forensics: Crime Scene Detective Review - Realistic to a Fault

Reviewing Forensics: Crime Scene Detective is a strange balancing act. On one hand, this is a game built with real credibility behind it, developed in close collaboration with the State Criminal Police Office Rhineland-Palatinate (LKA RLP), and it shows in the small, deliberate details of its case work. On the other hand, credibility doesn't automatically translate into fun, and too often this is a game that mistakes friction for authenticity.

Your job here isn't to chase anyone down or fire a weapon. You are the scientific authority the investigators lean on once the sirens fade and the scene goes quiet. Find the traces, analyse the facts, and finally reveal the truth. It's a great pitch, and for the first two hours or so, it's fine.

Realism versus fun

Where Forensics: Crime Scene Detective shines is in its analysis work. Comparing DNA samples, matching fingerprints, or reconstructing a bullet trajectory… you have to scale evidence up and down, rotate it, and physically line it up until it fits. It's essentially police busywork turned into a puzzle, and in the lab - a hushed space where all you hear is your own footsteps and the low buzz of the machines - it works. There's a real sense of calm, methodical satisfaction to it.

The loop itself is straightforward: select a case file, review the evidence and reports already attached to it, then fast-travel out to the crime scene to collect more. Once you're satisfied you've gathered everything relevant and analysed it, you compile a report and send it off to solve the case. You do get your results back, so you know how meticulous you’ve actually been. 

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DNA comparison is a bright spot in Crime Scene Detective

Getting to that satisfying lab work, however, means wading through a crime scene process that can quickly turn into a bit of a chore. You can only carry one item at a time, so documenting evidence means picking up evidence tags, placing them, walking back to your case to drop them, picking up the camera, walking back to take the photos, and repeating that cycle across every other method. There's no inventory, and no way to juggle tools simultaneously.

I do appreciate that the back-and-forth is intentional design signed off by actual police consultants, and there's something to be said for that level of care. Still, I couldn't help but wish for a touch more flexibility here, perhaps the option to carry two tools at once, which would go a long way toward keeping the momentum of a scene without sacrificing that procedural feel entirely.

The crime scenes themselves add to this a little, too. Evidence gets flagged as you approach it, which takes away some of the sense of discovery you might otherwise get from searching a scene yourself. Combined with the one-item limit, things end up feeling more sterile than tense. And the realism doesn't extend everywhere: e.g. blood samples I collect simply teleport into my evidence box rather than being placed there by hand, which undercuts the very authenticity the rest of the game is so insistent on.

The bigger issue is the tutorial, which walks you through crime scene basics, photography, evidence collection and documentation, fingerprint analysis, and so on. It's slow, offers no option to skip it, and by the time it ends, it feels like you've already seen most of what the game has to offer.

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Every piece of evidence gets its own entry in the case file

Cases beyond the tutorial were a little simpler than I'd hoped, too. They do grow in scope as you progress, but the added scale doesn't always come with added depth - the core loop stays much the same whether you're on your third case or your thirteenth. There's also no story to follow and no characters to speak of, which means there isn't quite the same pull from one case to the next that the mechanics alone can offer.

The actual crime scenes feel a bit underdressed as well. One case has a woman finding a body in a car park, yet you're only given access to a tiny slice of it, and there's no body at all, just drops of blood, shell casings, and a gun left next to nothing. There's a broader pattern here, too: fingerprints tend to show up only where the case needs them to, rather than scattered across a space the way they would be in real life. Door handles, light switches, surfaces you'd expect a lived-in space to be covered in prints - most of it is left untouched, and it's usually just the one or two spots tied to the puzzle that actually carry evidence. For a game that leans so heavily on procedural accuracy, that gap does stand out.

Even so, it's a genuinely interesting premise with real forensic rigour behind it, but there's not much holding it together beyond its insistence on being "true to realism," and that realism has clear limits of its own.

Final thoughts

Forensics: Crime Scene Detective did not really impress me, and I say that as someone who is no stranger to tedium in games. There's a difference between deliberate, rewarding slowness and busywork for its own sake, and I feel like Crime Scene Detective spends too much of its runtime on the wrong side of that line.

It does have a compelling hook and a lab-analysis loop that's meticulous in all the right ways. But it's let down by almost joyless crime scene mechanics that prioritise procedural accuracy over player enjoyment, and cases that, so far, don't reward the patience they demand.