By searching for interactive mystery games due to my passion for interactive mystery narratives I came across ‘Deadline’ by Marc Blank, published in 1982 by Infocom, which I was not aware of. It’s one of the classic text adventure games from the early era of interactive fiction, structured similarly to a mystery novel or film. The player is a detective investigating the suspicious death of a wealthy man, who must explore the mansion, question suspects and combine clues to solve the case within 12 hours.
For those of you who have played this game before, which way of accessing it do you consider better for its features? Should I preferably download it or play it online? And through which interpreter?
It’s usually better to download IF and play it locally. This allows you to save your game, create transcripts, and, of course, play the game without Internet. The interpreter you use doesn’t really matter, and is mostly up to personal preference.
Pick your operating system from here and select an interpreter that you like. If you want to be able to play as many games as possible, pick one that has a lot of different supported systems (but at least have Z-code). I use Gargoyle on MacOS, but people also like Frotz (Windows), Lectrote, and Spatterlight. A lot of interpreters also have customizable interfaces, so it’s really personal preference.
Again, I don’t know the specific features of Deadline, but since it’s an older Infocom game, most interpreters that support Z-code will be able to run it well.
I would download it. A successful playthrough of Deadling will involve many saved games, and you’ll likely want to maintain them on your own device.
You will want the “feelies”, if you don’t already have them. These include documents about the case. They’re helpful, but also atmospheric and, for lack of a better word, neat.
Here’s a link to a pdf containing all of the feelies, but it is in black and white. It also contains a manual, which you might find helpful.
You can find color versions here, though they are in individual files which might be a hassle to keep track of.
I thought Deadline did some really clever things, and I found it much more engaging than “Witness” another infocom mystery that was published a few years after.
If you’re also playing more recent games, I recommend “Color The Truth” as a text whodunit with a really clever mechanism.
As a wild tangent to Deadline, on and off, I’ve considered ideas for a sequel. I took some “seed” work originally from @Adam_S and knocked it into a document.
The plan was for me to work on the further details, character designs, dialogue etc.
One idea was to make the housekeeper “Mrs. Phong”, which i thought would be nice twist.
Deadline is one of Infocom’s very early games and a very fun one in my opinion.
It is a bit unforgiving with regard to some events in the game happening regardless of where you are - keep a lot of saves as you will inevitably have to restore from an earlier point.
