Thanks to this translation patch I found a new favourite PC Engine game I had never even heard of before seeing it listed on the site. Private Eye Dol is a detective mystery visual novel-esque game with adventure game elements and light puzzle solving that succeeds at being immensely charming and genuinely suspenseful and even somewhat atmospheric when it needs to be. Exploring, finding evidence, questioning NPCs and interacting with the world make up the core of the gameplay, that while simple and light are still involved and engaging enough for Private Eye Dol to feel like something that fully benefits from it’s video game format, as opposed to just being a manga or anime.

Presentation is superb, extensive voice acting for every single line, well drawn and detailed character portraits and some lovely fully animated cutscenes. I was honestly surprised by the fact that the game is still fairly lengthy, I was expecting the single disc to run out of space for all of that dialogue and animation by about a third of the way through (as most cinematics-heavy early CD games like this seem to), so I was pleasantly surprised to have so much more to play. It’s by no means drawn out however, it left me perfectly satisfied when it came to a close after three days of playing in the evening. The attention to detail is also superb. The world feels extremely alive with various NPCs running around following their own agendas as you play through the game, and a ridiculous amount of unique voiced dialogue lines absolutely everywhere giving me a constant feeling of “they really thought of EVERYTHING here”. If a default line for talking to a character won’t make sense for those five real-time seconds where something else is happening, there will be a new line of dialogue to accompany it, that kind of thing.

With that in mind I have to give a huge thanks to the translator as this could not have been an easy translation at all. Between subtitling the cutscenes, the extensive amounts of dialogue and the need to translate puzzles clearly so they still make sense after translation, this must of been a huge undertaking. And in spite of that, playing through the whole game on original hardware, I ran into zero crashes and didn’t pick up on any typos the whole way through. Seeing such an obscure game get this much love and care is wonderful, I genuinely hope that this game gets more attention as a result because it’s well deserved, both for the game itself and the translation job.

The only potential glitch I noticed was during a brief period in Scene 2 Part 2, if inspecting the stump with the rope tied to it above the cave during that period (If I recall correctly it was some time shortly after entering and exiting the cave itself) the game displays the text for the Tengu Rock signpost instead. There’s a good chance that could just be a glitch within the original code as opposed to a translation patch error however.