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The production values of this game are through the roof. An extremely late PC Engine CD-ROM² release, Private eye dol arrived in August 1995, several months after the PlayStation, Saturn, and even NEC’s own PC-FX had launched and almost eight years after the PC Engine’s launch, long after the 8-bit console had faded from the spotlight. But with its sumptuous visuals and a stacked cast providing full voice acting for every character, it’s obvious that this is more than just a quick cash-in to eke a few final bucks out of a dying platform.

As with many late PC Engine CD-ROM² games, Private eye dol is an adventure game that prizes narrative over mechanics. The story follows May Star, a teenage actress who finds that she has a talent for solving mysteries, possibly inherited from her father, a police detective who died five years ago. The game, which is surprisingly quite lengthy, is separated into four self-contained scenarios, each around a few hours long. Along the way, an overarching plot emerges in which May discovers the truth behind her father’s mysterious death.

Private eye dol is a highly unorthodox take on the Japanese adventure game genre. The majority of the time, the game is presented from an overhead perspective similar to RPGs of the era, except with no battles or stats. While this style eventually gained a foothold with RPG Maker games such as Yume Nikki and To The Moon, Private eye dol stands among just a handful of contemporaries attempting a similar approach. The best known are probably the Super Famicom games Ihatovo Monogatari and Marvelous: Another Treasure Island (which technically does have some combat, despite a very heavy emphasis on exploration and puzzle-solving).

But Private eye dol is constantly experimenting with form. The game frequently switches to the first-person view and menu-driven exploration of more traditional Japanese adventure games, going so far as to embrace this style for an extended stretch towards the end of the game. Even when it sticks to an overhead view, the game does a lot more than just ape the style of 2D RPGs: Gorgeous character portraits take up a full half of the screen during conversations, and smaller window overlays are used to effectively detail key items or present lively multi-character discussions. This attention to detail extends to the overhead view, where the chibi character sprites display a remarkable variety, sometimes having unique animations just for a small one-off gag.

While the game doesn’t have much in the way of puzzles in the Western adventure game tradition, there are sections where you’re expected to put together the clues to investigate the right spot to find the next piece of evidence and even a handful of mazes to navigate through. During the third scenario, an excursion to an island resort, you’ll even need to deduce key locations on a map based on contextual clues provided by conversations with other characters. You will frequently need to actively think about the next steps to proceed; you can’t simply brute force your way through menus.

Private eye dol still falls victim to one of the most irritating flaws of Japanese adventure games: It’s highly linear and requires triggering specific flags to move the plot forward. The game can be infuriating in a few spots where it seems like the next event requires combing through every last dialogue option with every NPC and examining every last object, sometimes multiple times. This is exacerbated by a lot of unnecessary padding that sends you back and forth between locations to trigger the flags. It’s not unusual for the correct leap of logic to be blatantly obvious to anyone paying attention, but for the game to stop you dead in your tracks until you re-examine some object so the characters can have the same revelation.

It also doesn’t quite hit the mark narratively: The darker elements are occasionally surprising, but they don’t always sit well with the sunnier vibes of the rest of the game. Some of the conclusions to the individual stories are contrived or haphazard, and the overarching plot arc’s resolution isn’t particularly satisfying. Still, May’s winning personality carries the show, and many NPCs have distinct and memorable personalities. Special kudos here to Supper, who did a superb job translating a very text-heavy game that also required overcoming some significant technical hurdles such as subtitling cut scenes.

Private eye dol isn’t quite a smashing success, but it’s an impressively crafted game that gets a lot more daring in experimenting with the Japanese adventure game form than you might expect. There really wasn’t anything else like this in 1995, and in many ways, it feels closer to a modern indie adventure game than anything from that era. If you have even a passing interest in the PC Engine CD-ROM²’s unique legacy or the development of narrative-driven Japanese games, this one deserves a place on your backlog.