(This next review actually is not as brief as I thought it was going to be, but c’est la vie.)
Review of Big Fish
Big Fish is a murder mystery with some aspects that work very well, and others that work pretty strongly against it.
At the core of this, there’s a mechanic that works beautifully. You gather clues, and then you accuse whoever you think is the killer. Simple, right? Except it’s not so simple—there are a lot of ways a game can get that process wrong. I’ve played detective games where the answer is handed to you on a silver platter once you find enough clues, without you ever having to decide for yourself. On the opposite end of the spectrum, I’ve played detective games where the evidence isn’t enough to confidently accuse anybody, and your final judgment ends up feeling arbitrary or like a wild guess.
Big Fish doesn’t have those pitfalls. It strikes a good balance: in order to decide correctly whodunnit, you have to think for yourself about the evidence and form your own idea of what happened, without the game holding you by the hand—and yet, the evidence you’ve seen is eminently enough to lead you to the right answer if you’ve been paying attention. When I solved the case, I had a genuine sense of, “Yes! I, the player sitting at the computer screen, have succeeded in detecting.” That’s a great feeling that even a lot of commercial detective-themed games fail to deliver.
Another thing I enjoyed is that there seems to be more to the protagonist than meets the eye. His weird toothbrush fixation. That understated moment when, after his ID and reporter ID fail to impress, he suddenly makes the sheriff fall in line by showing some unspecified third credential. Who is this “ordinary” guy, really? It adds to the mystery.
As for what did not work so well, there’s a lot of that, too. The pronoun usage in the narration is wildly inconsistent—sometimes you’re “you,” sometimes “I,” sometimes “we.” There’s a mix of line breaks and paragraph breaks strewn about seemingly at random. The adherence to writing conventions is just rough all around; a conscientious editor could have improved this a lot.
There are many things about the world that don’t make very much sense.
- A key that is found in a desk, outdoors, in a public place, and unlocks two different safes in two different people’s houses?
- The implication that one guy created a race of alligator-human hybrids using a pile of beakers in his basement? I feel like you’d need more resources by a wide margin for a project like that.
- The fact that the sheriff dutifully helps you through everything only to betray you at the end—if that was his plan, he could have and should have at least tried to impede your investigation.
- The fact that you find bloodstains and incriminating rope from the day of the murder just casually sitting in plain view in someone’s house a year later.
So while there are some things I very much appreciate about Big Fish, they’re competing for attention with some janky aspects.