The Coffee Cake Caper
by Darius Foo
Hey look, a game that’s NOT mostly about a corporate dystopia. I guess this is this year’s mystery-at-a-carnival game - this time with 100% fewer murders.
Maybe I’m just bad at puzzles today; I am kinda under the weather. I pretty much just followed the walkthrough for this one. I’m not sure I would have gotten most of the deductions by myself. (also the solution/walkthrough is slightly wrong about the first accusation: it’s a costume, not a uniform).
Actually, maybe I would have gotten some of them. But it feels pretty overwhelming when your first accusation is: You are lying about where/why/how/when you/Edwina/Diffany/Cornie/Barnaby went/took/ate/got/stole the rainbow frosting/blanket/dough/coffee cake/oversized baking pan/uniform/garbage truck/dark circles/phone/home/competition/pretty dress/car/photograph/stomachache/snow/paper baking cups/shift schedule/costume. And then to make it stick you have to pick What you ate and Why and three pieces of How I know evidence each from that list of nouns (and for some reason it seems like the order of the nouns is randomized in each dropdown? They’re not alphabetical, and they’re not the same as each other). And it looks like you need to get all five of those correct to continue. And most of them were mentioned only once in the 6K word story you’ve read so far.
So this is one to approach when you’re ready to dig into mountains of interviews to find which piece goes where. Wish I’d set it aside to come back to when I was in more of a deductive mood.
I do think the pacing could have been better: that initial huge infodump and then you keep having to scroll back and pull pieces out of it and fit them into the new bits you get every time you successfully accuse someone. And it was a little odd that it started with the very silly very over-the-top pompous Georgian-era origin of the detective’s society and pops to “the present day” and a cozy mystery and does nothing with the secret society until sending you a judgy letter after you’ve wrapped up the case. It was fine, just an odd contrast that I don’t think it really needed.
And it was maybe a little bit too much “we’re going to use every piece of evidence exactly once and involve every suspect in some way that they don’t want to admit” for my taste, but that was appropriate enough for this kind of game, so eh.
Dunno. It seemed fun! I just wasn’t quite up to attempting the deductions properly given how intimidating they seemed at first glance. I’ll be curious to hear how other people get on with it. It may just be more of an “oh, you need two pieces of evidence for this one, what’s the thing I’m missing?” deal and it’s obvious that they’re correct once you sort them out of the story.
Looks like it’s using a custom engine written in OCaml and it worked pretty well for me. I did wish that it would have left the choices at the bottom so I could see more of the scrollback, instead of scrolling them to be roughly vertically centered, but otherwise…
Edit: Oh, and apparently you can restart the game without using browser dev tools to delete the game data - according to the itch page you tap/click the (completely unmarked) first mention of Quibblebottom 5 times. Uh. That could have just been a “Restart” button, but sure, why not?