The Secret of Chateau de Moreau appears to have promise on first glance. It’s a point-and-click mystery in a lush European setting, with somewhat muted anime-style sensibilities. Ostensibly, you’ve seen this plot before: a young boy, Antoine, is summoned to the estate where his late stepfather has died. Shortly after Antoine and his family, a diverse cast of Clue-like characters, learn foul play was involved in the elder statesman Moreau’s death, it’s revealed that the boy is sole heir to the family’s inheritance. As these things tend to go, Antoine is fingered as the killer, and it’s your job to prove his innocence.

Sadly, that seems to create a bit of a logical fallacy. Antoine has been away from the titular chateau since he was a boy, with no contact from virtually anyone in his family. There’s more than meets the eye here, sure, and it’d be wonderful if you could pass off the abrupt change on the behavior of the game’s characters following the reveal at Moreau’s will reading. That’s not the case, however.

Rather than following a logical plot line of making Antoine one of several suspects, everyone instantly turns on you, seemingly because of The Secret of Chateau de Moreau’s execrable translation. Riddled with typos and localized in only the basest sense, any sense of differing personalities among characters, let alone more complex ideas like motivation -- seemingly important distinctions to make in a mystery game -- are completely lost.

And when a game’s interaction consists of ‘moving’ from one overhead map to the next, tapping various items in rooms, conversationally investigating your fellow house guests, and solving puzzles (all on mostly static screens), you’d better hope the narrative is interesting enough to keep you playing. Instead, every character in the game comes off as overly aloof, obnoxiously childlike, or cartoonishly angry or aggressive. With a vibe like that of Nintendo DS great Hotel Dusk: Room 215, I really wanted to like this one more, but neither the gameplay nor anything else about it is compelling in the slightest.

The bottom line. If there’s a secret to Chateau de Moreau, it’s that the writing and translation are so amateurishly bad that it entirely sucks any enjoyment from the game. Functional mechanics don’t constitute a worthwhile experience.