Uncover the Smoking Gun Review

Uncover the Smoking Gun is a 3D first-person investigation game developed by ReLU Games and released on the 24th of June. In it, you play as a private investigator solving murder cases related to something called “Project Atlas”. 

The story is pretty interesting, with all the murder cases tying together to our investigator himself and the setting of the world at large, which is not too original but still really engaging: robots have gained free will and now coexist alongside humans. In the first case, there is even a robot that lives as the son of the murder victim, and right alongside his deathbed, there’s a recording of him leaving all his belongings to the robot. You are presented with information on the case right when starting it — the man’s wife injected him with a drug that is lethal in an overdose — killing him. She has now been taken into police custody, where she is being interrogated, but if it was as simple as that, a private investigator wouldn’t be needed for the case, so you have to figure out if that’s really what happened.

Initially, the gameplay looks fairly simple, and like most other detective games, you look around a crime scene for evidence and information and can draw your conclusions based on what you find. So what’s special about Uncover the Smoking Gun? Its questioning system uses AI. You can freely type in your own questions about anything you can think of, and the robots will answer. Most of the answers are not predefined, although some of the story-relevant ones are, which can feel a little weird once you find them. It’s still a really interesting mechanic, though, and definitely one I’d like to see more of in the future.

The game’s 3D models and textures all look really good, and some of the scenes are absolutely beautiful. Part of the artwork for evidence you can find (such as pictures on walls) was generated by AI tools, but the majority of the game’s artwork and graphics weren’t. There don’t seem to be any optimisation issues either, as the minimum requirements are really low.

There isn’t any voice acting in the game, which is a bit of a bummer. Giving the robots an AI-generated voice would have both made it more fun, as you wouldn’t have to read so much, and it would make sense — robots having a robotic voice isn’t weird at all. Other sound design elements are all great, but there are still not a lot of them, so the experience can be very quiet a lot of the time. It’s not really an issue, though, as it both adds to the realism of it — empty crime scenes are usually quiet — and the lack of sounds helps you concentrate on figuring out solutions to the case.

With an interesting and engaging gameplay mechanic I haven’t seen before and really good graphics, Uncover the Smoking Gun is a pretty good game, but it does have some problems, mainly the fact it lacks a keybinding system. While the default binds aren’t bad at all, not having the ability to change them to something that’ll be more comfortable for me is definitely a negative. It’s also a pretty short experience: there are only five cases, and each doesn’t take anything more than around 50 minutes. It’s a bit of a problem considering the game’s not-that-cheap £16.99 price, but considering the innovative and probably costly AI mechanic, I don’t think it’s unjustified.

Overall, Uncover the Smoking Gun is a really good game based on a very interesting idea. It definitely has some issues, but none of them are big enough to actually make the experience bad. If you’re a fan of investigation games or just want to see AI being implemented inside of a videogame, it’s definitely worth a try.