Detective Dotson review: Fun indie side-scroller that decently captures the Indian aesthetic

Indian games are hard to come by on PC because most developers target the much more lucrative mobile market. The last major one to come out was 2020’s Raji: An Ancient Epic, and it was well received by fans and critics alike. Detective Dotson, on the other hand, is a much smaller project that aims to paint a more realistic picture of modern-day India. Currently, you can play the game’s demo on Steam, with the full game slated for an early 2025 launch on PC and Xbox Series S|X. We got access to a pre-production build of Detective Dotson that is playable, but not entirely free from hiccups. More about that in a bit. 

Detective Dotson doesn’t offer much in the way of visual fidelity. It is a 2D side-scroller with a late 80s/early 90s pixelated vibe. You can run it on just about anything with a CPU/GPU, but there’s one caveat. Due to a bug in Unity, the game does not play well at anything above 60 Hz. Often, it didn’t register my inputs, and on a few occasions, it straight-up froze when I tried to peek through a looking glass. There are a few other traversal bugs as well. The developers have been made aware of these issues, and they should ideally be fixed by launch. 

Detective Dotson is set in a quintessential Indian city where you play as the game’s protagonist. You’re a detective tasked with solving puzzles by piecing together different clues obtained by interacting with different NPCs. I’d go as far as calling the game a platformer because it lets you run non-stop and fall damage is non-existent because the concept of a health bar simply does not exist and Dotson magically pulls out a parachute every time he takes a fall.

Aesthetically, there’s everything you’d find in an Indian city. Street vendors, crowded markets, tacky hoardings and for that extra bit of immersion, copious amounts of trash on the streets. Occasionally, an NPC will give you side quests for hints that can be redeemed at the end. Or you could get borderline useless items. Detective Dotson is, at its heart, a giant mix of fetch quests peppered with some light platforming.

The game also gives you some disguises to better obscure your identity. These come with unique abilities that you can use to prompt NPCs to act a certain way. Progression is often tied to these disguises, so keep an eye out for them. Once you’ve gathered all the clues, you’re tasked with piecing them all together in a Charlie Day-esque way on a board. It even has strings and everything.

That’s about all there is to Detective Dotson. Find NPCs, talk to NPCs, walk around, rinse and repeat till you have everything you want. Detective Dotson’s gameplay aspect is fairly tepid. Depending on which cases you solved, characters involved in previous instances have unique dialog. It’s a nice touch that gives coherence to the game’s universe. Detective Dotson is Masala Games’ maiden project, so it would be unfair to expect AAA or even AA level of polish.

In a market dominated by 10-year release cycles, projects with a smaller scope are hard to find, and I found the experience quite refreshing after a marathon Horizon Zero Dawn Remaster session. I’d classify it as a decent palate cleanser you can finish over a weekend without serious commitment. This, of course, means there’s zero replayability, but I wouldn’t lose much sleep over that.

However, Detective Dotson is somewhat lacking as a detective game. Even as an indie project, it comes off as a bit too casual. While you have to pay some attention to NPC’s dialogues to piece together a conclusion, the reward doesn’t feel worth the effort. An easy fix would be to increase the number of NPC interactions and variables involved in solving the case. In the real world, not all clues lead to something meaningful, and it’d be nice if Detective Dotson implemented such a mechanic.