Death on the Stormrider (Daniel M. Stelzer)
This was a very clever puzzly game that I wasn’t quite clever enough to match. The worldbuilding was fun, the characters were distinct, and the mystery had a satisfying conclusion.
The game is definitely weighted on the ‘solve puzzles’ side of things, and it rewards careful and lateral thinking. All of the puzzles are seamlessly integrated into the setting and story, and solving them was always satisfying… when I could manage to actually solve the puzzle. I often could! But there were several I floundered about.
And nigh-disastrously, I came this close -><- to thinking I was done with the game when I was not. There’s an unfortunate but understandable pattern that comes with hints, where every time you turn to get a hint, your bond with the author goes down–you believe more and more that the two of you are simply on a different wavelength, and you will not be able to solve the next puzzle, either. Every time you do solve a new puzzle, that bond gets rebuilt. I ended up going pretty far with a reasonable bond with the author, but it kept getting chipped away as I got stuck several times, and by the end, the bond was almost shot. This was the point where I had unanswered questions, but had reached an ending, and I thought that was all there was! You can see my thought processes at the end of my transcript (stormrider2.txt - Google Drive) though of course there are huge spoilers at that point.
I think the hint system itself may be partly to blame here–the hint topics didn’t match the ‘tasks’ list you have in-game, so figuring out what to reveal was somewhat a matter of guessing. But more importantly, if one of the topics had been ‘How can I tell who the killer is?’ and another had been ‘How can I tell what the killer’s motivation was?’ (or something similar) I would have known there was an answer in-game about the killer’s motivation, and could have at least attempted to follow up accordingly.
It’s also possible that the description of the packets led me astray, or at least could have provided a clue as to exactly what sort of thing I was dealing with here, too?
I’m spending too much time vaguely complaining. Instead, I should tell people that there is indeed a satisfying conclusion to the game, and it involves solving all of the tasks on your list, even the ones that don’t seem relevant to anything. You might need hints, but stick with it: the author will come through for you in the end.
Did the author have something to say? Yeah, more or less! Mostly interesting worldbuilding and a crime setup for you to discover.
Did I have something to do? Absolutely. Lots of puzzles to solve, well-integrated into the world and setting.