White Birds’ Crime Scene, also known as Criminology in various parts of Europe, was the last adventure game developed by Benoît Sokal’s French studio before it closed its doors. There’s probably a connection there. Whether this forensic mystery for the Nintendo DS is reflective of the company’s financial struggles at the time or merely contributed to its demise after the fact, one thing is clear: Crime Scene doesn't even approach the quality of company’s previous titles. Not only does it suffer from confusingly shallow storylines, the gameplay is so full of tedious minigames that are so brutally unforgiving that you'll want to commit unspeakable acts of violence of your own before long.

The fictional Crossburg is a city where crime is rife and corruption is part of everyday life. Players control Matt Simmons, a young detective eager to serve justice and make Crossburg a safer place. Matt is a forensic specialist dropped head-first into his first case, in which a high-ranking police officer and his wife seem to have died in a double suicide. But there is some suspicion of murder, and it is your job to visit their home and collect evidence to prove how and why they died. That is only the beginning, however, and you’ll investigate five cases in total, each one linked together by shared suspects, motives, locations or witnesses. These cases deal with serious crimes like murder, drug trafficking, terrorism, illegal testing, and kidnapping. Exciting as that may sound, Crime Scene succeeds only in showing that being a forensic investigator isn't anything at all like what they show on CSI. Instead, if we believe the game, it is interminably boring and extremely punishing, often for things beyond your control.

The DS top screen is used for displaying characters during dialogues, location overviews during investigations, and forensic apparatus during analysis. The touch screen is where the action happens, along with a couple of icons to bring up a quick travel map, clue inventory, an overview of all characters in the current case, your email, and access to the game’s hint system. In each location, you must find areas of interest by sliding the stylus until the cursor changes shape, though even that is hard to see, as the default circle merely radiates slowly and slightly outwards. Sometimes a scene will clearly show a pool of blood or a tire mark, but other times it’s just a tiny box in the corner of a room that contains a clue. A lot of time is spent simply hunting for those pixels that'll indicate there is something relevant hidden there. It doesn’t help that hotspots remain active even after you've collected the necessary evidence from them, though the game does tell you when you have found everything in that particular location.

Once you locate a point of interest, a simple tap brings up a detailed view that allows you to collect items or samples. A few tools in your kit allow you to see or access hidden evidence, such as a UV lamp and blue spray to reveal wiped blood stains. To accomplish the actual collection, you'll need to use the correct tool from a selection of about ten, and the game judges how well you perform by filling or decreasing a competence meter. Use the wrong tool for the job, or use it incorrectly, and you get punished. This sounds reasonable in theory, but often there isn’t enough feedback to make the proper choice. It’s possible to lose points for using a glove where a tweezer is needed, but how are you supposed to know if a bullet is lodged too deeply to just pick it up?

Even when you do select the right instrument, you won’t know what to do with it, at least at first. The manual offers no explanation, and although some brief text instructions provide basic pointers when you first need to use a new tool, the directions are very vague. What’s worse is that you have a limited time to perform the task successfully, and any time spent reading instructions is valuable time lost for actually carrying them out. Why not add a full tutorial session in which you can practise until you are confident about using a particular tool? Or better yet, just scrapping the pointless timer and fail clauses entirely? After successfully completing a particular task for the first time, it does get a little easier once you know what you are supposed to be doing, but there are enough different tools that you’ll feel at a serious disadvantage for quite a while.

Of course, success is not something even a tutorial can guarantee, as using a tool isn’t just a matter of applying inventory like in most games. Most of the evidence collection is done in the form of minigames. For instance, gathering fluids requires dipping a swab in a solution while a gauge sways from green to red. If you leave it in too long, the swab breaks and you lose points. By rubbing the wetted swab over the stain while holding a shoulder button as yet another meter decreases, you gather the fluid, whether blood or sweat or detergent. This takes an immense amount of precision and a great deal of luck, as the actual area in which you need to sweep your swab is much smaller than the stain, and you can't see where you are supposed to touch and where you aren’t. Every time you go outside this invisible area, your swab breaks and you get punished. Use up too many swabs and your boss Alexandra fires you from the team – game over. With some stains, it can easily take dozens of tries to get it right, which is a lot of unemployment.

That’s just one example, but most of the processes are problematic in their own ways. To use the tweezers or scalpel, you'll need to follow a pattern on the screen with your stylus, sometimes repeatedly, until the timer runs out. The problem is, the touch screen often doesn't recognize your input or says you dropped the tool (when you clearly haven’t) and you'll need to start over. Other times, after finding a fingerprint, you'll need to apply powder, blow away the excess with the DS microphone and then apply a bit of tape. That seems fairly straightforward, and it should be, but determining the size of the tape is once again a ridiculously precise job; it should roughly cover the print, but there is very little difference between too large and too small, and exactly right is somewhere in between two maddeningly undefined sizes.