34 | THE KILLINGS IN WASACONA
34 | THE KILLINGS IN WASACONA
by: Steve Kollmansberger
Progress:
- I completed this game, receiving a pretty good ending (4 out of 4 correct, the suspect arrested and charged), in around 36 minutes without the use of a walkthrough. I played as the “Negotiator” class.
Things I Appreciated:
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Something I really liked off the bat was the opportunity to select a class. I liked the implementation of d20 rolls/checks where I could plainly see what the consequences of my specialization were. While it is frustrating to fail many rolls in a row, it makes succeeding checks on a bad skill feel like more of a breakthrough, and I think it helps add texture to a choice-based narrative where otherwise, you’d just get way too much information for free. Using semi-influenceable randomness is, to me, a reasonable way to do that and I had a good experience with it.
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I thought the social world was well-constructed and appropriate in size for the scale of the mystery. I liked that when I went to locations and talked to people, I would see connections that directed me to other locations. There was not really a time where I clicked on a location just for the sake of clicking on it; I was making a choice to follow a lead I had picked up from a conversation or scene. So this is a case where I felt like I was actively solving the game, instead of the game solving itself while I made naïve clicks.
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The in-game clock felt consequential. There are locations that are logically unavailable if it’s too late at night. Moreover, at one point I made a decision to tell the college to shut down. And moments later, I had plans to continue searching at the college, but couldn’t, because I had it closed. I did this to myself! This was a great moment because it made me feel consequences for a choice that I made, but didn’t ultimately stop me from arriving at solutions. I like the feeling that I can and might botch this game with poorly thought out choices, and as a result, I felt like I was rewarded for strategic thinking later when I did successfully solve the game. Whether or not the game is actually that hard, it at least successfully creates the illusion that you could easily fail it, and that is powerful in shaping player experiences.
Feedback/Recommendations/Questions:
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One of the fascinating elements of the game is the gap that is created between what the player knows (by analyzing the text, thinking in a critical/meta way about the narrative, or by reading the prologue) and what the protagonist knows (the result of dice rolls based on stats) and how the game is hard-coded to remember the results of those rolls when it comes time to accuse. For context, I played as the “Negotiator” class. The downside of this class is that your “academics checks” have a massive -6 penalty. And there were a lot of these. The thing is, while I failed every academics check except one or two with lucky rolls, but failed checks still gave me (as the player) a lot of information. An example: I failed to identify the footsteps at two locations, but out-of-universe as a player, I had a meta awareness that those footsteps would more likely match than not even though the protagonist character did not have that same awareness. By the end of the game, even though I had failed so many checks, I felt like I was too sure that I was correct about my suspect, given the information it seemed like the protagonist actually knew. There was really no other person that I considered accusing, though it felt weird to just accuse the same person of all the crimes. So the question I have is: does the prologue (invisible to the protagonist but known and remembered by the player) simply reveal too much? It does happen in mystery novels (that I have read to give critiques to writing partners, I don’t normally read them) that there are killer POV chapters like this, but I think it hits differently in a gamified/IF version of that genre where you are meant to immerse yourself more into the character. Is there another way that this game could have opened to set the scene without revealing so much critical information?
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There’s a stylistic choice here that makes sense for the genre but I still think is worth discussing. The writing is very crisp, focused, factual. The people you meet are mainly described in terms of basic demographic characteristic (age, ethnicity, gender) rather than a more florid or evocative way of describing the presence of a person in a room. I understand that makes sense for the genre perspective and the idea that you are playing as someone whose job it is to do detective work and piece it together. But I found that it made me dissociate from the potential emotional impact from what is happening. (This isn’t a criticism of the game, really: I think it accomplishes the writing style it sets out to accomplish. I just wanted to describe what my experience was. To be fair, I don’t normally engage with procedurals as a genre, unless it’s in like a fantasy setting or something, and would not be surprised to learn that it’s very much expected for this type of work to be presented in a professional style.)
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The user interface of this game is beautiful. It is crisp, clean, polished, the colors are just right and never distracting. It looks like an interface that is crafted with a ton of care. So I feel like a game with this much labor to produce a balanced visual aesthetic deserves better than what is (in my opinion) tacky and distorted-looking AI art. I understand that there are plenty of people who aren’t bothered by AI art, (and ultimately, it’s not going to factor into my score as I have other priorities than moving scores by full points based on just cover art), but because cover art is so important as a first impression for a game, I hope it isn’t terribly condescending for me to say that I feel like this game should have cover art that more positively and accurately represents the quality of its contents.
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
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As discussed above, I absolutely loved the crispness of the visual presentation of the UI. If I were to develop another IF game, I would want to study the spacing, layout, and color scheme of this game to get a sense of why it came across so cleanly to me.
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I thought a truly unique feature of this game is the stats summary page, where you are presented with your playthrough and how it compares to other people who have played this game. Since you don’t have an opportunity to play the game unspoiled a second time (as you’ll already know too much), I thought it was a really engaging element to contextualized your own bespoke personalized experience. Did you have an average experience, or is there something that stood out? For instance, there is apparently a possibility that Melody’s parents will lead a protest against the sheriff’s office?? That didn’t happen for me, but imagine how exciting it would feel for the 8% of players to learn that they had such an aberrant experience of the game. (Maybe less fun to learn that you were one of the 3% of players to receive a grade of “All Talk, No Results” or “Abysmal,” which is yet to be “achieved” at the time I played.) While this wouldn’t make sense for other genres/types of IF games, I thought it was an inspired choice here.
Quote:
- “A quiet starlit evening covers the small town in an illusion of peace and security.”
Lasting Memorable Moment:
- When the RNG allowed me to overcome a -3 penalty on a physical check to chase a car down to learn critical information. This made up for what felt like a dozen disastrous academics checks. Earlier I had scored a -5 out of 20 on one of the academics checks because I rolled a natural 1 with a -6 penalty.
(Stay in school, kids… etc.)