Death on the Stormrider
There is always a tension in mystery fiction between the genre as puzzle box and the genre as exploration of human psychology and relationships. (This is a bit of an oversimplification—there are other elements to the genre—but for the purposes of this review, it’s good enough.) Some authors are primarily interested in why the crime occurred (i.e., what combination of personality and circumstance would lead to this?) and in what impact it has on the people who are affected by it; others are primarily interested in how the crime was committed, how it was concealed, and how the detective will find out the truth. Either can be narratively interesting, but I feel that the best mystery narratives manage to incorporate both to a significant degree, even if one is clearly more prominent.
Death on the Stormrider features a PC investigating a murder among a ship’s crew that speaks a language that the PC does not speak. It’s a choice that in some ways plays to the strengths of the medium—conversation can be done well in parser games, but it’s hard to pull off, and I think games where it’s a major aspect of the gameplay but not the main focus of the game are perhaps the hardest. Stormrider chooses not to wrestle with that, leaving the player to focus on skulking around unseen amid NPCs who patrol (mostly) fixed routes, getting into places they aren’t supposed to go, and manipulating a variety of tools and devices.
All of this works pretty smoothly (minus a couple of minor quibbles I’ll mention at the end). Once you get a sense of how Stormrider operates and what it generally expects you to do, the logic of most puzzles makes sense, and the a-ha moments are plentiful and satisfying. The automatically-updating list of tasks and clues was a great help in keeping track of everything. By and large, I enjoyed the process of playing the game.
But Stormrider is pretty much all puzzle box and no psychology, and that left me feeling a bit unsatisfied by it as a story. Some of this is down to the language barrier, which leaves the crew members functioning in the game more as automata than as characters. Their thoughts and feelings are inaccessible to the player, and we never learn much about how they relate to each other; this is a deliberate choice to increase the PC’s sense of alienation, but it does mean that there’s not much emotional weight to figuring out who the murderer is, and the “why” is something the player can only guess at. A bit more characterization for the PC and their brother could have balanced this out a bit without the need for any changes to the language-barrier conceit, but I didn’t get a strong sense of who they were either.
It was a solidly constructed puzzle box, in the end, but I wanted a bit more emotional investment.
(The minor quibbles:
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When a large setpiece can be moved by the PC, I would like a little more indication of it. Maybe it’s me, but I tend not to try to pick up or move large objects unless the game gives me a fairly overt nudge in that direction.
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I’m sure it was mentioned somewhere that there are exposed pipes in every room, but I played in a few shorter sessions, and by the time I actually needed to interact with the pipes I had forgotten that they were there. Fortunately the invisiclues got me unstuck, but I would love for this to be more explicitly mentioned in room descriptions.)