Hot Tin Roof gives you a cat, a gun, and makes you figure out the rest

Hot Tin Roof: The Cat That Wore a Fedora by Glass Bottom Games is a noir themed 3D side-scroller starring Private Investigator Emma Jones and her feline partner, Franky. With Jones’ all purpose revolver, the two scour all over to solve the slew of unsolved cases that have plagued the world of Tin Roof.

The game is an innovative blend of mystery, platforming, puzzles and exploration. It finds inspiration in games like Metroid and Castlevania yet carves its own identity in with its 3D, noir roots sultry smooth jazzy shadow lighting and snarky dialogue. This is the most enjoyable part of the game, exploring Tin Roof and its civilian characters. It was fun and playful while maintaining a sort of seriousness I expect in a noir drama. Think less like Rockstar’s L.A. Noire and more “Radio Daze,” the Rugrats episode where Tommy, the masked detective, solves the mystery of “The Maltiese Woodchuck”.

The game rewards you for exploring outside of the beaten path, but going off the beaten path sometimes leads to a lot of confusion and aimless walking. Hot Tin Roof‘s world isn’t exactly easy to comprehend, and unfortunately there is no map system in the game. It’s a large enough world, with enough twists and turns, to make getting turned around incredibly easy. Similarly, the game doesn’t provide a solid way to point the player toward progress.

Hot Tin Roof does have a tip system to help you if you’re stuck, but even then those tips aren’t always useful. Further, tips can only be accessed at the police department, so heading back to get a tip is not always convenient. Hot Tin Roof relies on the player’s patience and intelligence to figure out where to go next, but unfortunately my patience wore thin quickly. The game does very little hand holding, which is great when you want to work through a puzzle on your own, but a little nudge now and then would have been appreciated.

I also faced a few issues with small bugs. Towards the end of the game, when I caved and checked a forum to figure out what to do, I discovered that there was a bug that prevented a conversation from starting that would have helped me know where to go next. There were other dialogue related bugs, where conversations were either cut off or didn’t pop up at all, but the developers have been routinely patching the game, so the minor problems I faced are already fixed.

Issues aside, there is still a lot to enjoy about this game. Jones’ revolver wasn’t perfect, but it was a fun tool to play with. Reloading the revolver felt slow at times. There is a shortcut to instantly reload, but it only reloads one specific bullet into each chamber. Sometimes a puzzle required different kinds of bullets to complete, so if I wanted, for instance, two bubble bullets and two fire bullets, I’d have to reload those manually. Since the gun is crucial for the entire game, reloading did lose its luster after the first few times.

But on the plus side, I never had to kill an enemy, and that actually felt really good. Rather than shooting baddies or pointing the gun at enemies to intimidate them, I used the gun to reach high places, burn boxes or find invisible items, among other things. Using a gun as everything but a weapon allowed the game to keep its not-so-serious noir charm. And hey, gathering new clues did feel rewarding, especially if I found them without having to hunt for too long. I may not have always known what I was doing, but neither did Jones, so we had that in common.

Hot Tin Roof does a great job of creating a world I want to solve crimes in. It requires intelligence, curiosity, and most importantly, patience, to solve all the mysteries Tin Roof face. The game is missing a few key mechanics like a map and hinting system that could have prevented the game from being infuriating at times, but even without it I found enjoyment in the city of Tin Roof. There were a few splendid moments where I felt like a real detective, running around gathering search and arrest warrants to capture the poor chump who thought they could get away Scot-free.