a friend & I played this yesterday and had a really awesome, 'talking afterwards about the design decisions we liked and how we wanted to play it again'-level time.
Experience needed: this was both of our first Descended from the Queen game, and neither of us have read The City and The City. It worked great. We ended up both separately referring to Bodies (2023) as a kind of style touchstone. The prompts offer a very smooth way into the world, letting you focus on cinematic details that strengthen your understanding of the story and your characters and their cities (a meal that evokes powerful emotions in one of you, a footprint leading away from the body, a political disruption in your detective's day). They also, from what we saw, don't require your characters to be cops. I think playing one detective as someone who just has a strong personal interest in the murder rather than being sent by their city could be great in this game. (Sorry, I'm planning for the next one already...)
Keeping your theories about the murder secret from the other person throughout the game is really fun. Even with two players adding increasingly specific clues, our final theories were intriguingly different.
Playing it 2-player, we got through less than a third of the cards (and so less than a sixth of the prompts), meaning it's very replayable! and we both would love to play it again. It took us about an hour and a half? You could definitely go in a more mind-bending time travel direction, or magical realism, political intrigue... I think the game gives good support for making what's happening personal for your characters, if you want to. Next time I think playing a more Inland Empire/Dale Cooper-type intuitive detective could be a lot of fun with these mechanics.
This could very easily be a framework for an epistolary game where you write the communications between your detectives... I'll stop musing out loud. I had lots of fun, thank you for writing and sharing your game! It was a great introduction to Descended From The Queen mechanics.