There are all kinds of ways to add interactivity to a murder mystery: this group of skilled static fiction authors seems to have chosen to build a maze of possible “solutions” and then flow along with the one the player chooses (or stumbles haplessly upon), setting the murder in on a spaceship in a hallucination-inducing hyperspace in aid of that. I haven’t chased down all 11 endings to see if some are more “canonical” than others, but at first glance it doesn’t seem so.
So. After you get through the vibe-setting, hand-wringing, can-I-even-trust-anything intro, you get a 30 minute real-world timer (which you can turn off) and you click through to the various areas of the ship to see who (and what) is there to talk to or investigate. People move around the ship semi-randomly, different options appear after you’ve seen or said different other things: it’s all very disorienting and maze-like.
And the writing supports this, and the timer adds tension (though the first two time I was worried about the timer and rushing through and stopped in under 10 minutes: I read fairly fast but I still suspect it’s reasonably generous. And again, you can turn it off).
It feels like a game you could savor once, taking your time, soaking it in, maybe taking notes, maybe just enjoying the vibes, get an interesting story and call that canonical. Or you could play repeatedly and try to figure out when and where things appear, which leads to what, untangling all the paths through the maze. Or you could thread through the slight maze of “where the heck are the tutorial/hint menus again?” and let them tell you how to find all the pieces. Lots of options.
May not be everyone’s cup of tea – I’m not sure yet what I’m going to end up thinking of it. But the writing and the vibes and the shape of the thing are kinda fascinating. Well worth checking out.
Addendum: gah, just realized how I put that. Several of these authors also do interactive narrative, it’s just that I know more of these names only because of their published prose…
All of us have written interactive fiction as well as short stories or novels, but I think it’s definitely fair to say that most of us are better known for (or focus more on) our non-interactive work!
Thanks for sharing your preliminary thoughts, Josh. I’m really curious to see what people think of the game.
There’s such a deliciously sticky, stretchy, taffy-like design tension here. I’ll be fascinated to see how different players resolve it.
There’s the initial play experience. OK, it’s a mystery, pencils ready to take careful notes …and then the tense, hauntingly hallucinatory experience of oh no the timer counting down, and there’s so much, and I don’t even know what I can believe, maybe I’ll just try this quick, then somehow …I KNOW that evidence wasn’t there before, where did that come from, what changed, what did I do? Wait. …I can just… accuse someone now? You’re letting me do that, I didn’t earn it, but… no, I want to se what happens-- oh!
Then there’s the clarity of the link presentation: these are flavor, these are EVIDENCE, these turn the page. And the hints, sitting there tempting your completionist child: you know you want to see this character’s story, just one little peep behind the curtain. And maybe this curtain? And that one? Come, child, let me lay out the whole intricate web of if/thens for you, it’s all here waiting for you if only you’ll look. Oh, fine, keep exploring on your own for a while first. Eventually you’ll succumb to the question of whether there’s a bigger picture lurking if you find all the pieces? IS THERE?
So good. Gah. I’ve seen several endings, I do want to know if there’s a canonical explanation you can piece together. But I think for me it feels more right to leave it a little dream-like. Maybe in a few months I’ll come back and dissect it.
I (as coordinating author) have an ending I think is more canonical than the others, but I think it’s more appropriate for this game that each reader decides!
I’m pleased to see you enjoying it so much, in any case–and in this specific, disorienting way.
I’ll first quote the review from my review thread; unfortunately, I didn’t have as good a time as Josh!
It was only from your posts, @JoshGrams, that I realised that you can accuse people. It was totally not transparent to me that setting someone to ‘high’ on your murderboard was the equivalent of accusing them; but reading your post, I realised that that must be the mechanism. Was this clear to you from the outset, or did you find out by accident?
I also didn’t realise you could turn off the timer; but had I realised it, I wouldn’t have done it. If the authors gives us a timer, it’s probably a game that requires a timer. Having actually played the game, I think that the timer ruins it… but that’s wisdom I only had after the fact. My advice to the authors would be to take the timer out now, during the competition; but from your posts, it seems as if perhaps you actually enjoyed it? Would you say it’s a net positive?
Yeah, that was interesting reading your review: I started playing by reading all the other menu items rather than starting straight into the game (random chance: I often don’t do that). And one page is a tutorial, that starts (oddly) by explaining the link markers, which are mostly clear as soon as you click one. But later on that page it does explain the accusation mechanism clearly enough that I did understand what to do. I’m still not sure what the medium level is for.
And maybe I’m more death-of-the-author? I’ll give the “intended experience” a try out of curiosity but I think gamedevs are usually too close to their games to be right about the best way to play them, so I’m not going to take it too seriously. So I had one 10-minute playthrough where I was racing through trying to remember what I’d learned and where things came from, but I pretty quickly found evidence for two people and just accused one at random figuring “oh well, this probably isn’t right, but let’s see what happens.” And then the second time through I was like, oh, fine, I have plenty of time, I can have the feeling of tension and time ticking down without actually being too pressured.
But of course there’s nearly an order of magnitude difference in people’s reading speeds, so adding timers like that is a mug’s game: they’re always going to suck for someone.
And maybe I oversold how good I think it is in an objective sense: there is a lot of design here that I don’t generally like, but I enjoyed the vibes and quit before I got fed up. I thought the everybody-might-be-an-unreliable-narrator thing and the invisible mostly-unclued maze of dependencies for when the clues and evidence unlock was kind of a neat experimental choice. So I shrugged and leaned into the dreamlike vibes and didn’t bother caring about whether it made sense.
If I was trying to understand what was going on and play it more as a game, then yeah, there’s a lot of design here that I normally hate. The timer is unnecessary stress (there’s an ending there if you let it run out, but… really? You have to do nothing for 30 minutes to see one of the endings? What a bad idea). “Choose a random victim and we’ll agree with you” is easily my least favorite technique for adding interactivity to a mystery: I want to feel like I solved something, not like the game is just mindlessly yes-manning me. There’s not enough guidance for where and when the two clues for each suspect become available, so I happened across them randomly rather than feeling clever for deducing where to look or who to talk to. So having achievements for collecting each one pushes it toward being more mechanical, rather than just stopping whenever you feel done.
I guess I also went into this knowing that most of these authors have written for Choice of Games and the style there is that the player is supposed to be able to direct the game so I was prepared for to try and enjoy that kind of thing. Usually Choice of Games pieces aren’t my jam at all. Actually, I was just thinking that the reason I liked Benjamin Rosenbaum’s recent release The Ghost and the Golem so much is that the player character feels much more defined to me: you can choose your name and all the gender options, but somehow the actual story choices feel like you’re choosing how to perform a character whose skills are already pretty well-defined. You enjoy singing and you’re good at it, but are you going to push yourself out there in public and ask to sing with some random performers, or are you more shy about it? How do you feel about this skill, how do you present it to the world, rather than what you’re able to do.
Yeah. I don’t know how relevant all that is.
I think I read the tutorial first, so I knew about accusations, and I deliberately ignored the parts I wasn’t going to like, and (as with the conversation around Imprimatura) deliberately stopped before I had to look at those parts.
I had read the tutorial first too, which says this:
This is fairly ambiguous. I mean, knowing now how it all works, I see how it is meant to be read. But I was afraid that the game would immediately end if I put someone’s suspicion to ‘high’ and that I then would see their ending to the story, rather than my ending where I accused the one who did it. It’s only after I found out that everyone can be successfully accused, and that this means there’s a separate this-is-the-person-you-accused ending for each character, that this text became clear to me.
Sorry to hear the game gave you such a hard time, Victor!
We tried a couple of different times to clarify that gameplay element during testing, but it doesn’t sound like we quite managed to hit the right results. I’m definitely open to rewording suggestions if you have them – or it could just be that the mechanics themselves are kind of weird and counter-intuitive, of course!
FWIW, I initially had the timer set to an hour, but that felt too long, and a few of our beta testers even commented that 30 minutes felt too long to them. So we did try to manage that, too (and provided the “turn off” option, as you noted, for people who want a more leisurely experience without the stress!)
I definitely appreciate the time you spent playing and commenting, in any case.
Thanks for reacting! I think it would help if it had been formulated thus:
I’m a little sad that I focused so much on my struggles with the game and didn’t really comment on what is perhaps more interesting – and well described by DemonApologist here – , namely the experience of playing this obviously naive AI whose reading of murder mysteries completely structures the way they see the situation. It’s like Northanger Abbey, except mystery instead of romance.
There is of course something fairly hilarious about the inane questions and accusations that form most of one’s dialogue options. Underneath the somewhat mechanical mystery, there is a poignant little comedy playing out, where the player character is too blinded by grief and excitement to see the plain truth: that the captain died of natural causes. That’s the point, and that is something I ought to have talked about in my review. So I think I’ll just append this little piece of text to it!
My advice to the authors would be to take the timer out now, during the competition; but from your posts, it seems as if perhaps you actually enjoyed it? Would you say it’s a net positive?