Murderworld
An X-men fanfic parser IF game. Long and puzzle-focused, with lots of moving characters, and across several acts.
There’s a short introductory vignette aboard their Blackbird plane as the superhero team returns to home base, tired from a mission, then a section where you get to choose a member to play as, as the team arrive back at their home mansion to find it heavily damaged, parts of it on fire. The team spreads out to figure out what happened and to make sure all the students and Professor Xavier is okay (or well, some of them do that). Then an act that involves the Murderworld in the title, as they’re kidnapped by villain Arcade (Sort of like a PG-13 Saw) and you take control of each member as they individually have to escape the little trap room they find themselves in before time runs out. Then a final act where you take down Arcade.
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I’ve read some of the X-Men comics before and am a fan, though it’s maybe more recent stuff than the era of comics I think this was going for? I did look up some well regarded classic runs at some point and read a few of them: I remember “God Loves, Man Kills” by Chris Claremont and a big story with Phoenix. The team’s always changing in the comics, but here it’s Cyclops, Storm, Wolverine, Colossus, Nightcrawler, and Dazzler. Dazzler’s the least conventional choice I’m pretty sure, but she’s got a novel set of light-and-sound based powers, and I can see how a lot of other candidates would have powers that are either overpowered (Any psychics could snap-solve the missing people problem) or would just have un-fun or useless powers for a parser game.
The mansion segment is the most impressive from a design standpoint. Six characters running around the mansion. You can choose one of them; the others will be independent NPCs, off doing their own things. I chose Nightcrawler here, because I wanted to see how his teleportation powers would get implemented (and I also kind of wanted to choose one of the less well known heroes because I figured less other players would pick him). One thing that becomes clear is that this is less like a finely honed superhero team springing into coordinated action, and instead something more dysfunctionally domestic. My character, Nightcrawler, wants to find a snack to eat first before doing anything else. Storm and Cyclops, the two natural leader types of the group, seem to be sidelined for most of the act squabbling over usage of the mansion phone. Colossus, the stoic, is the one that puts his head down and starts trying to put out literal fires, in the kitchen. I think Wolverine is looking for students, but he seemed to spent most of the act in one room. I had no idea what Dazzler was doing; she just hung around in the library for most of the act. I had to ask some of them for help at certain points, and you can also do things for them as well, after which they might move around the mansion of their own accord. It’s a set of six differently powered, differently motivated NPCs to design around, especially since each of the six characters’ playthroughs must have had to be tweaked as needed to provide an interesting set of puzzles for each of them. The ones for Nightcrawler are fine, but it felt like I spent more time exploring the mansion and just talking to the characters and getting to know the space and the team, which was neat. There’s also a set of students you’re locating who were all fairly interesting, with some providing a slightly less jaded perspective than their teachers (young love, a go-getter eager to help patrol, a gossip hound…) and seemed like original characters I think?
One thing I noted was how the NPCs move around. The general impression I get is that in the 90s and maybe the early 2000s, authors seemed more enamoured with the idea of more dynamic NPC agents. The idea I think was that it would be more interesting if the NPCS didn’t just stand in one spot all the time, so there’d be games where NPCs would walk from room to room in the same way your character does, and maybe even try to perform actions like the PC. I specifically remember Four in One, which is a 1998 comedic parser game where you’re trying to corral all four Marx brothers together to film a scene even as they keep running off. My inkling is that authors perhaps got less interested in that as time moved on, and started experimenting elsewhere, maybe more on providing narrative depth for the NPCs for example. Authors can also just teleport NPCs to rooms as needed as a way of moving them around, and I don’t think it’s a worse implementation from a player perspective unless you’re building something around timing puzzles. So the room-by-room shuffling around maybe has became a bit anachronistic now, in the same way scoring has taken a bit of a backseat. The NPCs in Murderworld do all move from room to room, and it leads to, yeah, something a bit classic and anachronistic feeling to me, but that feeling makes sense for this, and contributes to the throwback feeling of the whole thing.
The next section after the mansion is a bunch of individual scenarios you have to escape from, with timed game overs if you take too long. I started with Nightcrawler again, who gets a fun character-appropriate setup involving a pirate ship (I think the character just loves pirate stuff? I’ve seen pirate stories involving him before). Solid puzzles involving his teleportation as well. Colossus is the blandest character on the team, and thus he gets the most generic scenario (I got quite stuck until a bit later on when the game starts dropping increasingly obvious clues). Cyclops is slightly more interesting, he gets to use his brain a bit which fits him. Dazzler is a neat setting, a roller rink, though I wonder if the calculator puzzle is going to become outdated by when and maybe where you went to school. Storm IS quite interesting, maybe the most engaging puzzle in the game (there are more fun but also more slight puzzles later), though the map is extremely large and my careless meandering meant I ran out of time and had to reload twice before I could quite figure out which of the four locks I’d disengaged the wrong way in her section. Wolverine also seems to have a section that more work’s been put into, as he has to help some robot workers figure out who killed their coworker. And there was also another approach during his section I could’ve taken according to the walkthrough. But I also ran into the time limit a bunch of times with him. Part of it was even after finding the secret vent, I was still invested in trying to help the robots instead of just trying to escape. I mean I guess Wolverine isn’t the most “save the cat from the tree” type of hero around–infamously so!–but I promised to help, and I wanted to actually solve the mystery! Maybe there WAS a way to solve things for them, but I didn’t find it and just ended up leaving. The person who killed the unionizer is just their manager, right? I saw some semi-incriminating graffiti, but wasn’t able to do anything with it.
That section varied a bit in quality and depth, but then the last section really picks back up again, probably the best part of the game as we get into some old fashioned heroics and teamwork which provided a good contrast with the sections before and provided some really nice puzzles that utilized their mutant powers here in interesting ways as you finally take down the big bad in the end.
Some of the X-men dialogue sounded a bit off to me; Wolverine sounds overly formal at times for example. But then it’s a bunch of very particular affectations, it’s not like the characters are consistent across the decades or that even the paid comic writers always nail it. I really like the Astonishing X-Men run by Joss Whedon, but one of the big criticisms people have is that under Whedon’s pen everyone sounds too Whedon-esque and quippy. I think he still manages to make each character feel distinct, but other people–uh, I’m probably getting sidetracked here. Anyways, regardless of voice, the dialogue also sometimes don’t flow completely smoothly. I think maybe its sometimes dialogue tags being overused, like some of the “character says” tags could be removed in back and forths, and also sometimes the emotions of certain lines come off a bit flat. Dialogue is hard and I’m not an expert, but something in my reader brain just detects some things felt off. One thing I did come to appreciate was how much character’s inner monologues gets a “Nightcrawler thinks” tag attached to them. At first it felt like a slightly odd choice, although the perspective here is slightly different from most other parser games in that it’s third person and a bit omniscient, and then I recalled how much classic comics used to use thought bubbles, and the the thought tags suddenly seemed to make sense and reflect that time period quite well.
The mansion part is decent, and then the Murderworld sections did feel a bit up and down. If the game had ended there, I would’ve found this fairly good, mostly admirable from a design ambition standpoint. But the last section really does elevate the pace quite a bit and end on quite an enthralling note. And even though all the sections preceding it aren’t quite as exciting, like I said, they end up providing some fun contrast in terms of how the characters behave to the last section. I did also really appreciate the love letter nature of this to something I’m also a fan of.