Picked this up on PC a few weeks ago and as the review says, it has the framework of something incredible, but the gameplay loop gets incredibly repetitive and once you work out the best way to solve each crime, it becomes almost trivial.
So you play the role of a private detective in a city sector in a dystopian noir-punk setting.
Your job is to solve murders & kidnappings along with complete various side missions to raise your social ranking in order to retire to a nicer part of the city.
The unique part about this, is that each city (there are some hand built ones or you can make your own) have around 500 procedural NPC's, each one with a unique name, their own address, job and daily routine along with their own markers like unique fingerprints, handwriting styles etc.
So you approach each crime by being able to investigate the scene, examine the body to establish a time of death, how they died. Even the location of the crime will have clues like fingerprints, a note from the killer, you can check the victims phone to see who they've been calling, get into their email if you can find their computer password to look for clues.
With this info you can do things like hack into local CCTV cameras at the time of the murder to identify suspects near the scene at the time, break into the buildings phone record box, check the ledger of the town black market arms dealer (if you can find them) to see if anyone has bought a weapon the same caliber as the murder weapon (providing they were shot) and even use the local town halls police database to check suspects if you can locate a code to get in.
You use this info to populate your pinboard and ultimately work out who the killer or kidnapper is:
My initial experience with this blew me away, there were so many possibilities, I've barely touched on the amount of different ways you can approach solving these cases. The problem is, that once you work out the path of least resistance, the game starts to become very repetitive and not very challenging.
As a proof of concept though, this is absolutely fantastic and I hope a decent modding community rises up around this, because the potential is there if a bit more variety was added.