As a lifelong science fiction lover and Singaporean, playing "Chinatown Detective Agency" was a rare experience for me. One is a point-and-click adventure for those who grew up traveling the world with the Broderbund's "Carmen San Diego" series. The other, while not mutually exclusive, is a game created specifically for Singaporeans.

In the year 2037, the country is undergoing an unimaginable process of deregulation, trains have anti-government graffiti, drones and droids are a common sight, and there is only one human librarian left in the country. The player begins as Amira Dharma, an ex-cop, working as a private investigator in an old store house in Chinatown. As she takes on cases and meets with clients, Amira begins to travel the world, tugging at the threads of a much larger and more dangerous mystery.

At the most basic level, it's really fucking cool to explore your home city in pixels. New York, Paris, and London (and to some extent villainized depictions of Cold War-era Moscow and Beijing) are old-fashioned, because they are old-fashioned. In mainstream pop culture, Singapore's Western fame is relatively recent: the final season of HBO's "Westworld" and "Crazy Rich Asians," which was a movie for Americans, with CDA interspersing bits of Singlish and Malay, I cannot understate how important it is to feature Singaporean voice actors with local English accents.

Overall, General Interactive has pulled off a superficial narrative that works for a general audience unfamiliar with Singaporean jokes and clichés, and a more nuanced storytelling that utilizes actual hyper-local knowledge: Singapore's huge church culture, class politics, drinking water supply, and so on. Of course, on a broader level, these issues are hardly unique to Singapore; widening economic disparities and environmental degradation are ubiquitous. The main plot is not rocket science, but mostly the usual patterns commonly used in dystopias: malignant AI, self-serving tech tycoons, and omnipresent surveillance. Many of the specious stories are extensions of trends such as mass automation, the rise of labor unions, and corporatism.

Most cases are relatively short. They may involve looking up and returning objects, decoding messages, finding clues, etc., and may go to a variety of cities. Amira uses a travel program called HORUS and the in-game clock to plan her flights. It is a very basic point-and-shoot scenario, but with the option to wound or kill. Ultimately, Amira has to choose a main client, and I chose Tiger Lily, a shady information broker who runs a "health club" in the Gay Run entertainment district. Her case involves the local megachurch, Self Temple, and the wealthy, dysfunctional family behind it. It is an incisive examination of Singapore's megachurch culture and one of the more compelling stories. I came away exhilarated and bitter at the same time, having been reminded of the role of evangelism in relation to Singapore's conservative values and outwardly secular image.

The puzzles are probably the most divisive part of the game; the main feature of CDA (which I mostly enjoyed) is that you Google yourself for clues. Even as a cipher and note-taking enthusiast, I found some of the more complex puzzles (especially the tablet) to be tiresome (partly due to the state of the review build I played). It's a fine line between giving players a sense of power and satisfaction while making them sweat a little, but CDA is on shaky ground here. The game has a librarian, Maytin, to help you out, so it's up to you to decide how masochistic you want to be.

Minor inconsistencies made for frustrating play at times. Early on, the game auto-saves after each incident. After selecting the main client, you should be able to save at your discretion, but this feature was only available for a short time, and as a result, if you failed a critical case, you had to start all over again HORUS costs a flat $550 for every flight, so the in-game money management Wasted opportunities to deepen An arbitrary week passes between cases. I'm not sure why Amira would wait a week before divulging important information to her clients. She pays rent and utilities for her office every month and eventually hires an employee, but does not pay that employee a salary.

Finally, I face the consequences of my actions. My heavy-handed approach means that certain clients will not work with me, and by working with Tiger Lily, she will have even more power. Overall, the script is a bit uneven. The main cast is fairly well characterized with unique conversational styles, but there are a few forced exposition pieces that veer into overly theatrical territory. Most NPC dialogue is one or two canned sentences, with the occasional odd and mildly jarring non-sequitur, consistent with the idiosyncratic nature of point-and-click adventures as an extension of the developer's personality

. Even with these shortcomings, the CDA must be especially meaningful to players like myself, and the task of reviewing it for a general audience is quite impossible. Despite the rise of Southeast Asian indies, due to my lack of cultural representation in the game, the CDA is still a bitterness that William Gibson, in his 1993 essay for WIRED, "Disneyland with the Death Penalty," decried Singapore as a sterile brain-dead hell. For Singaporeans still reeling, it has inadvertently carried the weight of an unwarranted talisman. It is a reminder of how fiction deepens our relationship to our respective homes and environments, and how through fiction we can explore contemplative paths to a different future. Perhaps CDA was always going to be a loaded experience for me. I could have spent all day thinking about local issues and cultural depictions, away from the general mainline. As a point-and-click adventure, it's a pretty good debut, although there is room for improvement. As far as cultural heritage goes, it's pretty great.