When Arthur Blackthorn — the richest man in the city, and the demanding face behind numerous potentially illegal businesses — is found murdered in the building bearing his name, a detective who’s one week away from retirement is given the case. Such is the premise of The Empty Desk, from CheesecakeGames, which just released this month. We got our hands on a review copy, and can now share our thoughts about this title, after finishing it just a couple of hours ago.
As the game’s secondary title suggests, this is the first chapter in the story of Detective Thomas H. Bennett, so maybe he’s not going to retire soon. Regardless of what happens in the future, he’s the aged protagonist in this first-person horror game.
Things begin as Detective Bennett picks up a newspaper while relaxing at a cafe. When he sees the headline, he makes a remark about how he’s glad he won’t have to take the high profile murder case on, since he’s so close to retirement and plans to coast to the end. That doesn’t end up being the case, though, because he immediately receives a call from his boss, which can be accepted or declined. I didn’t prolong the inevitable by declining it, and just accepted right away.
Soon after, our detective is on his way to the monolithic Blackthorn Building, which is home to the billionaire’s coffee company, his insurance company and seemingly a number of others. Upon entering this massive, dark and empty location, he finds himself faced with three halls of numbered elevators, which go from number one to number sixty-nine. However, since our protagonist hates elevators, he asks his desk-bound assistant to find the stairs.
Almost all of The Empty Desk’s three hour runtime takes place on one floor, which is the top one. There, Mr. Blackthorn’s office is nestled among those of his top employees, as well as the records storage for his insurance company. It’s here where the man was murdered, and the blood remains behind his desk.
The player will explore this floor thoroughly, and will be able to enter previously closed off areas later on. Their goal is to solve the murder, and find the whereabouts of Mr. Blackthorn’s daughter and her fiancé; however, it won’t be easy or straightforward. You see, there’s a horror and paranormal element to this title, so you can expect doors to suddenly close, lights to flicker, and strange things to occur. Jump scares can be toggled off, though.
The basic gameplay loop found within The Empty Desk involves exploring different parts of the same floor, finding important documents (like proof of fraudulent dealings, the files of disgruntled employees and more), and taking pictures of those things, as well as cameras. You will knock over towers of papers to find things hidden underneath, search for hidden documents and basically scour every inch of the offices and storage spaces. However, the camera (which you earn two or three chapters in) can only take six pictures, so you’ll need to recharge it every so often.
If you’re thinking that recharging the camera involves finding more batteries or new canisters of film, you’re mistaken. Oddly enough, this is handled in a very different way from what anyone would expect. You see, once you fill your roll of film, you must go into a dark hallway, and navigate through it until you find a strange, lighted hall. There, you’ll approach a platform in front of a screen and a projector, which will show you the number of clues or documents you are supposed to find in that chapter. Approaching this screen causes all of your pictures to be shown and evaluated, with either a green checkmark or a red X. Once you’ve taken pictures of all of the required documents, files, or cameras, you’ll be able to progress to the next chapter, continuing the narrative.
The camera is also used to pick out things that may or may not be important during your exploration. When you look through the viewfinder, you’ll see things that glow in a shade of blue. Sometimes these are clues or documents, or other important things, but oftentimes they are not. It gets kind of annoying having to manually scan so many things (by bringing the camera up, moving the cursor over something blue and pressing Y to zoom in, before waiting for a metre to fill). Surely a better system could have been designed.
The camera also provides a bit of light, for some reason, so it can be helpful for an extra bit of visibility in dark areas. However, this same light — which seemingly cannot be toggled off — can cause some pictures to be far too bright. Thankfully, the game doesn’t punish you if your picture of a document or file is so bright that it’s hard to make out what the subject was.
This gameplay loop becomes quite repetitive, and the controls for the camera can be a bit cumbersome. The odd time, my pictures also weren’t acceptable, despite doing nothing differently. This didn’t happen much, though.
When I first read about The Empty Desk, and looked into it, I wasn’t expecting such a point and click or cursor heavy game, but that’s what you’ll get here. You’ll notice that it was likely originally designed for a mouse, but it controls decently using a controller. It’s very simplistic in terms of gameplay, though, and gets a bit boring as a result.
Near the end of the game, our detective enters into a kind of dream state, wherein he must navigate a fun house styled area full of halls covered in clocks. It’s very dark, monochrome and kind of neat looking. This section became incredibly frustrating though, because of what it tasks the player with doing. That is, walking through this confusing labyrinth of clock covered hallways in search of six small, black, keys. Did I mention that the environment is essentially black and white? Needless to say, this was a pain in the ass, which took far longer than it needed to.
Due to a crash, which happened right after I’d found the sixth key and unlocked the corresponding lock box, I had to do this chapter twice. I ended up turning the brightness up, though, and that made it easier.
In actuality, The Empty Desk suddenly crashed to the Xbox dashboard twice. It did it that time, and it did so again when I was about finished the next chapter. Hopefully this can be fixed via a patch in the near future.
Outside of the above, there’s one aspect of the game that I should mention. That is, the fact that there are approximately 100 hidden gold coins. I found 55 of them, and thought I hadn’t missed many. I really took my time and looked everywhere too. Finding them unlocks character profiles, which you can read, as well as achievements for finding 50 and 80 of them.
How about the story?
The narrative found within The Empty Desk is interesting enough, and it goes in some very odd and unexpected directions. At its core, it deals with an evil insurance company and the soulless man at its helm. There’s talk of denied claims. However, based on its cover art and the currency symbol found on documents discovered in game, I believe this was to have taken place in the UK, where they have ‘free’ healthcare. Then again, I saw an architecture magazine that mentioned Chicago, so I’m not too sure. That part of the narrative would’ve made more sense if it was concretely set in the US.
I liked the detective as a main character. He had some depth, despite this being a relatively short game (made longer by some of its needle in a haystack finding and fetching quests). However, I’d like him to have more personality and more of a unique presence going forward.
I won’t say much more about the story, but know that it’s definitely weird.
Presentation-wise, The Empty Desk is fine, and has a pretty good sense of atmosphere. It looks kind of dated, and a bit simple at times, but I appreciate what the developers did with what they had. I know that I couldn’t make a game like this. Sure, it looks a bit dated, but it works outside of the crashes.
The writing is solid, and most of the story is told through dialogue bubbles. The sound, otherwise, is fitting and fine. It serves the gameplay and the story well.
With all that being said, I must say that I respect The Empty Desk more than I enjoyed playing it. It’s an ambitious effort from a small developer, but it’s unfortunately not all that fun to play. Scouring the same environments for occasionally well hidden documents, dealing with the camera’s limitations and looking for those keys near the end wasn’t something I found very fun. However, as part of a whole, they add some challenge and gameplay to what could otherwise have been a basic walking simulator with horror elements.
This isn’t exactly a bad game, but I wouldn’t say it’s all that good either. It’s hard to recommend though.
This review is based on the Xbox Series X version of the game, which we were provided with.