East Side Story is a point-and-click mystery in the Tex Murphy mold (at least until that series got moldy), developed by Mikael and Eleen Nyqvist, a Swedish husband-and-wife team -- their fourth game, in fact, featuring the English sleuth Carol Reed. It's first person, meaning that, like Myst, you never see your protagonist onscreen; and like Myst, screens are static images, with hotpoints you can mouse over, and the ability to turn to either side and move forward or back.
The images, however, are not rendered 3D, but photography -- nicely captured photographs of the town of Norrköping, in Sweden. This has its good side and its bad; the photographs are technically excellent, and many of them very attractive, providing visual quality that would be hard (and expensive) to create with digital assets. On the bad side, well, the real world is full of irrelevant detail, and sometimes it's hard to see what elements of a scene are important and worth remembering, a problem compounded by the fact that the game is designed so that some on-screen elements are not hotspots when you first encounter them, but do become hotspots later, when a puzzle requires you to use some element.
As an example, in an early scene, you see magnets on a refrigerator, but the cursor doesn't change when you mouse over them, because they are not yet important; later on, possessing a magnet is important to solving a puzzle, but unless you remember having seen the magnets, you'll have a problem.
Conversations (and some comments by the protagonist) are carried in voice. Carol Reed herself is a well-spoken (if non-U) Englishwoman; she is on vacation in Norrköping, which seems an attractive town (in the summer, at least -- Scandinavia can be a depressing place in the winter), and the other characters she encounters are, of course, Swedish. They speak English (as most Scandinavians do), but not always idiomatically; actually, this is a clever design element on the part of the Nyqvists. English dialog written by non-native speakers can often be awkward, but since these characters are non-native speakers, any infelicities are explicable since, you know, this is just how Swedish people speaking English actually speak.
The mystery itself is well conceived and well executed, albeit my tastes in the genre tend more to the noir; but the story is engaging, and the solution satisfactory. I fear that the ease of photography does, however, lead the Nyqvists to include rather more locations than you'd expect in a typical graphic adventure, which in some cases means a fair bit of tedium scanning many screens for a single important element; there is, however, a nice walkthrough on Game Boomers should you find yourself at a loss.
Aside from the use of photography, there's nothing particularly innovative about East Side Story; yet most games in the modern indie adventure game revival take their cue from Lucasarts, and it's nice to see a game more reminiscent of Tex Murphy and Jane Jensen's games, a straightforward whodunnit.