Jack T. Ladd gets a rude kick on the face when the feared galactic taxman, IDRS, finally gets him. The all-seeing tax officials don't care about the illegal nature of Jack's gains, all they care about is, that he hasn't paid any taxes for his gains. So, Jack has a choice: either pay up or get his organs harvested to cover up the pending taxes.
Tayte is Jack's first port of call. A shadowy moon cloaked in the almost perpetual night thanks to it being shaded by its mother planet. As a bonafide professional criminal, it doesn't take long for him to find financial opportunities in the form of removing desirable objects. He's promised a stack of money if he would happen to find an egg of a rare bird, a famous sculpture and some Plenocredits bonds.
After a good nights (?) work, Jack ends up being double-crossed by his employer and he ends up in jail. Luckily, a mysterious entity sends a tool for him, which helps greatly in getting out from the slammer. Also, he manages to get a friend in tow in a form of a gun maniac Narm N'palm. The escape happens through an annoying maze that suffers from poor hotspot detection.
Jack was rescued by a shadow organization so secret, that even their tea lady has a license to kill. They want Jack to take care of a small problem with a local dictator, who has an access to a Transator device, which needs to be taken care of discreetly like.
Transator, if you were wondering, can hack into the IDRS systems, making it possible to translate all the funds they have to a single person. Jack also finds out from the daughter of the dictator, that it's possible to transfer his tax debts to another person with it. Seems like an obvious solution to his own problems.
Anyhow, Jack and Narm end up on planet Shmul, where they break into the palace. Jack is, again captured, but as he has sweet-talked to Ruth, the dictators' daughter, he soon gets free and infiltrates his SkyCity. There, Jack finally confronts the dictator and wipes his tax records clean. All ends well, even Ruth ends up slapping the sleazeball Jack to the face so that justice is served as well.
Innocent Until Caught is not a good game. Firstly, it has some technical issues what comes to the UI and the hotspot detection. The hotspots often require pixel-precise detection, which leads to many situations, where you just try to click specific areas frantically until you finally manage to hit the spot. The UI icons don't make it any easier to guess which part of the icon actually is the point that allows the hotpot detection to happen. The inventory can quickly turn into a cluttered mess, as you can freely place items wherever you want, there's no grid there, only freeform placement. This isn't much of a problem after Tayte though, as the inventory items reduce in numbers quite a bit in the latter half.
Then there's the music. Initially, it sounds decent, but soon enough you'll notice that the game has only a handful of songs, which then loop endlessly in specific locations. That is, every screen in Tayte has the same song just as every screen in Shmul has the same song. And they aren't THAT great tunes.
The puzzles are pretty terrible as well. Often you need pixel-precise detection just as you need extreme moon logic skills as well. Quite often the puzzles make no sense at all at any level. Any logical puzzle in the mix feels like an oversight on the developers part. Of course, you could chalk the silly puzzle on Innocent Until Caught being a comedy game, but there's a line between absurdly logical and nonsense, at least what comes to puzzle design.
Oh yeah... Innocent Until Caught is a comedy adventure. I guess, the developers were thinking of tapping the same vein as Leisure Suit Larry but combined it with Space Quest. I say Larry, because there's a feeble attempt in making crude sex jokes just as there are crude attempts in making sci-fi jokes. Rex Nebular, while not a great game, succeeded better in both. And that's saying something, alright.
As far I can tell, Innocent Until Caught is not sold anywhere at the moment. That's all the same, really, as I wouldn't recommend buying it in the first place. If you really, really want to experience it, I guess some has done the hard work of uploading a playthrough on YouTube.
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