TEEFAX: Cold Case

It's so realistic, it shows how useless the police can really be!

Another retro-skinned pocket puzzler from developer Div. Gather clues to unlock more clues and zero in on a murder suspect, all from the comfort of your... home television? Given the incredibly short length of the game and the logical leaps required to solve some of its puzzles, recommended only for ardent sleuths and only on sale.

This review is intended to be purely informational, but since steam forces a side, choosing recommended on the basis of low price and moderately challenging if experienced blind.

TEEFAX sheds some of the pretense of is predecessor TELEFAX (review here), and tells you exactly what you're here to do: Unlock the mysterious door and solve the crime. This is done by way of reading through news pages, locating codes, and manipulating what's on screen to advance further. If that last part sounds vague, it's intentional: Some of the solutions require you to "think outside the box," or put another way, do things that would be impossible on a real teletext reader. There's no programming knowledge required for this one, only a bit of brute forcing and pixel hunting, arguably standard stuff in the point and click genre.

Commendation is deserved for fixing a major problem of the first game, namely, the controls. Here, your mouse is your guide to everything, not only granting you access to contents with a single click, but also ease of access via a handy set of links at the bottom of the screen. It may sound strange to mention this, but after having to use keyboard navigation to scroll menus it's a tremendous relief.

Thankfully, TEEFAX doesn't make any grandiose claims about a choices-matter plot or intricate conspiracy to unravel, but like its predecessor, there isn't any narrative hook here. Solving a cold case without a motive? And what list of suspects? There are no characters, so it can only point to one individual. There isn't a sense of fulfillment for getting the right answer, the only answer. It was process of elimination.

And on that note, one more word about the puzzles. I can't outright detail what they are and why they could be considered frustrating, without ruining the experience. But I can say this: A good puzzle game provides a path for the player to follow. It may ease the player into a mechanic they'll see later by using an obvious example. TEEFAX never does this. It's puzzle A to B to C without logical transition or procedural flow. It's built to be brute forced. Once you open the door, you're presented with a lock. But what the lock requires is something you've never done in the game up until that point, and has never been communicated as possible to do. The solution is quite literally to click everything until you discover it, after which the mouse will give the solution away. And then you'll never use it again. That's the jarring dissonance in the design of the TELE- games that leaves something to be desired.

If you decide to purchase this, be aware the entire game can be completed in minutes. Naturally, not knowing what to do is likely to give you about an hour of head scratching, unless you're a puzzle master who's seen it all before.

Recommended only on sale, and only if you like point-and-click puzzles. Also bear in mind it's restricted and doesn't add to profile stats (at time of this review).

Achievement Hunters: Fully guided. If you spoil the entire thing, ~5 mins to 100%

TEEFAX: Cold Case is an unusual retro puzzle game that runs as a bit of an imperfect simulation of ancient 1970's era Ceefax/Teletext, and for you young kids out there, in the age of analogue TV, they used vertical blanking buffers to piggyback text information along with the video broadcast. If you had a television set that could interpret that information, you could use your remote control to read those pages of text, typically simple information like news, weather and sports.

This puzzle game copies the look and feel of Teletext (to some extent) and you're challenged to read through the news pages to determine that a murder has taken place and use various clues to eventually open a door which will solve the murder, by basically just clicking around on the screen.

It's interesting that they recaptured the look and feel of Teletext, but at the same time we do need to take a little step back and consider that this is a for-profit game on Steam competing with the giants of the genre. I know that it looks dated on purpose, but the reason for the game looking bad isn't as important as the fact it does. And the puzzles themselves really aren't all that great. Even Pony Island did better.

Let's go into why a mildly clever idea doesn't work out to a great investment for your average PC gamer (who, looking at the Steam leaderboards, is probably too busy playing CS:2 to bother with this).

From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.

There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision.

The game interface is mostly just text boxes/dialogs and features mostly static, barely animated 2D pixel images, the kind of thing that could easily be done in Adobe Flash. While that might be fine for the 1990s, gaming has evolved a lot since then, the ATI Rage became mainstream in 1996... it's 2024, and that kind of thing just won't fly anymore, it's just not visually up to scratch. For gameplay purposes, because the user interface for this game is mostly just 2D static text/images... it might as well be a web page. It's functionally no different from a browser game. And we all know, Steam isn't here to compete with Chrome and Firefox. If the game can be done in a web browser, it's just not rich or compelling enough to appeal to serious gamers on PC.

The controls can't be customised because the game has such a dumbed down, simplified interface that it's just point and click stuff like a browser/Flash game. The fact that the interface is this dumbed down might be seen as a problem in itself, however... this is a fairly shallow experience if you're the kind of gamer that likes to play games with deep, rich control schemes and interaction. You'll get none of that here.

Some of the defects in the game can be attributed to the choice of using the Clickteam Fusion construction kit - the "No-Code" construction kit that "Anyone can make games with!!". Including, you know, people who aren't game developers. Which is a problem. This is a very poor quality toolset sometimes used by amateur developers as it's free (so they don't have to pay for GameMaker Studio) and doesn't require advanced game development skills, but unfortunately has very limited capabilities (it's arguably worse than GameMaker Studio). Just as you can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear, you can't make a great video game if you use a terrible engine. So it's inappropriate when amateurs try to use these for profit, without any actual, real game development effort taking place. This doesn't result in products that have any real meaningful value for gamers.

These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.

The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 3 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 100,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.

So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?

TEEFAX: Cold Case has the laughable price of around $5 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam. This is also competing with over 11,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.

Profile Features Limited!
Valve have marked this game as "Profile Features Limited" at the time of this review. This is usually caused by poor sales figures and low community acceptance for the game (to date). Until this status changes, this game will not give you +1 to your Game Collector badge count, appear in profile achievements or any other Steam meta-accomplishments, nor can it be displayed in some profile showcases. If these factors are important to you, it may be worth holding off before buying this game.