How big were Infocom's detective stories?

Authoring General Design Discussions
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I find it hard to grasp how much story / evidence / discovery there is in e.g. Deadline. Has anyone made a graph of what there is to be discovered, how discovery X enables discovery Y etc until you can reach a successful ending, for any of Infocom’s detective games?

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I have not seen a graph or table (some enterprising note-taker might have created one), but in Deadline there is not only the size of the game but being in the right place at the right time. So the schedule/simulation is a major thing to contend with. I think the critical path is:

NOTE this spoils Deadline entirely, do not read unless you have completed it (or don’t care)

EDIT: see below for a more accurate list

  • Search Dunbar’s bathroom, find LoBlo
  • Rub blank calendar page with pencil
  • Show calendar rubbing to George
  • Encounter gardener around 11a, find holes, find fragment
  • Analyze fragment
  • Analyze fragment for LoBlo
  • Listen to will around noon (so you can follow George)
  • Barge in on George in secret room, get Focus papers
  • Show papers to Baxter
  • Show report to Dunbar
  • Follow Dunbar
  • Get stub
  • Show stub to Dunbar, Baxter
  • [may or may not need to follow them to shed, and look into window)
  • arrest Baxter and Dunbar

The Deadline Invisiclues may be helpful

@eriktorbjorn has a rather funny walkthrough for The Witness, it is less complicated to say the least

I recently had to examine both The Witness and Deadline in detail, feel free to AMA

EDIT: Though of course there is much more story than that, since the player must uncover context and background along the way

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Thanks Drew, this is exactly what I was looking for!

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You’re welcome! Though I see that I confused the pad and the calendar in the beginning, so this hopefully is a better and final list.

  • Search Dunbar’s bathroom, find LoBlo
  • Rub pad with pencil
  • Turn calendar to july 8
  • Examine/search trash (in library)
  • Show calendar to George
  • Show pad to Baxter
  • Encounter gardener around 11a, find holes, find fragment
  • Analyze fragment
  • Analyze fragment for LoBlo
  • Listen to will around noon (so you can follow George)
  • Barge in on George in secret room, get Focus papers
  • Show papers to Baxter
  • Show report to Dunbar
  • Follow Dunbar
  • Get stub
  • Show stub to Dunbar, Baxter
  • [may or may not need to follow them to shed, and look into window)
  • arrest Baxter and Dunbar
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Judging by the ZIL source code, I think it’s enough to show the ticket stub to Dunbar. Though apparently it’s important that she doesn’t hear Baxter’s explanation first, because then she’ll just agree with him. There is a flag that’s set when Baxter’s and Dunbar’s explanations differ, but it’s not used. Maybe it was deemed too hard?

At the point of arrest, there are only four things that the game checks for but of course you need to complete other steps to achieve them:

  • You need the papers from the safe.
  • You need the lab report about the ceramic fragment.
  • You need to have read the message on the notepad.
  • You need Dunbar to admit that she went to the concert with Baxter.

Fun fact: There is an alternative solution to the notepad. The most obvious way is to shade it with the pencil, but HOLD PAD UP TO LIGHT works too. Not the most obvious syntax, if you ask me.

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Here’s the walkthrough I wrote for The Witness. I made it mostly to see how little sense the game would make if you did the absolute minimal work:

WALK TO FRONT DOOR. RING BELL. ASK PHONG ABOUT SUICIDE. WAIT.
SIT ON WOODEN CHAIR. WAIT UNTIL 9:04. [answer YES until Mr Linder is dead]
GET UP. PUSH BUTTON. WAIT FOR PHONG. ASK PHONG ABOUT BUTTON.
WAIT. [answer YES until Phong leaves] HIDE BEHIND LOUNGE. WAIT UNTIL 1:00.
[answer YES until Duffy returns] ARREST MONICA.

Technically, you have a chance of surviving even if you don’t sit down when Mr. Linder asks you to, but then he will keep bugging you about it and the game will ask you if you want to keep waiting, so I don’t know if that really counts as fewer moves.

From the ZIL code, as I understand it, to win the game you need to:

  • Prove that there is a hidden mechanism. There are a couple of different ways:
    • Get Monica to admit helping set it up. She should do that if you accuse her after she sees the corpse. (That’s when she’ll tell you her father was dying.) She should also do it if you’ve pressed the button while it was still wired up, she’s seen the corpse, and you ask her about any of the parts of the mechanism (the button, the wires, the putty, etc.)
    • Get Phong to admit helping set it up. He should do that if you accuse him after identifying his footprints outside and finding the gun receipt or, much simpler, if you ask him about the button (or clock or gunpowder) after pushing the button while it was still wired up.
    • Push the button while it was still wired up, and either analyze the gunpowder or find the gun inside the clock.
  • You have to establish Monica’s motive. You can do this in several ways, though it’s probably easiest to get it from Phong. Monica may clam up in some cases, and I haven’t bothered to figure out exactly when and how.
    • You can ask Phong about Mrs. Linder’s suicide.
    • You can ask Monica about Mr. Linder, either before or after she’s seen the corpse.
    • You can ask Monica about Mrs. Linder or her affair.
  • You need to either have seen Monica unlock the clock, found her carrying the handgun, or used the clock key yourself. (In the latter case, it doesn’t seem like you have to actually look inside the clock. Simply locking or unlocking it appears to be enough.)
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For suspect you need to present the detective needs to know about 12 pieces of evidence. (Or more, but I don’t think there are any more than that.) Based on the ZIL code, they are:

  • The body.
  • The lariat.
  • The hair inside the fairy mask.
  • Analyzing the hair inside the mask.
  • Cochrane’s business card.
  • The sales agreement.
  • The weather, specifically that it didn’t rain as hard when Alicia arrived.
  • Alicia’s wet coat.
  • The documents in the trust folder (or the folder itself if the documents are inside).
  • The investor list that you saved from the fireplace.
  • The broken glass.
  • Alicia’s fingerprints on the glass.

But the code is a bit hard to follow in places, at least at a quick glance, so I could be misreading.

Unlike Deadline and The Witness, there seem to be very little optional pieces of evidence in it. I think that makes it less fun to play. In Deadline, I loved being able to count the china in the kitchen and see that one cup was missing, even though I didn’t have to. In The Witness, you can make casts of the footprints outside to figure out who was there, but you don’t have to do that either.

That made it feel like I was making intuitive leaps while solving those games, while Suspect felt more like checking off a list.

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Thanks for diving into the code. Based on past conversations, I knew you would have great insight into these mysteries.

This is very astute–there are many opportunities to make observations that do not lead to a victory state but have two important effects:

  • Give you, the player, a fuller sense of the world that can lead to new discoveries or questions
  • They just feel cool. I felt quite clever counting the cups.

This feeling is mostly absent from Suspect

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I still am dumbfounded how my younger brother’s friend solved Deadline in a few hours without clues back when it came out. I think they were 11/12 years old.

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