Forensic Necromancy: A Murder in Nineveh by Daniel M. Stelzer
This is quite possibly the nerdiest version of a true crime story I’ve ever encountered. To be fair, I avoid true crime most of the time, so that might not be saying a lot. But speculating on a real historical murder mystery from 600 BCE? Pretty neat!
This isn’t a game that made me feel a lot emotionally-speaking, but I enjoyed the mechanics of playing it, and I found the setting novel and intriguing. As someone who likes the idea of parsers, but refuses to spend “free” time on any computer big enough for a proper keyboard (unless, I guess, I am writing something of course), I am personally a fan of the hybrid parser/link clicking design. There was enough openness in the puzzle solving that it engaged me beyond total straight forward clicking, but it was not particularly challenging in the end, and puzzle lovers might find themselves a bit disappointed here. I did have a bit of trouble when it came to the final step, knowing that I needed to climb the equipment cart, but for some reason even though I had pushed the cart where it needed to go and climbed it, something was not presenting itself. It didn’t work until I walked away from the game for a few hours and came back, the voila, no problem. Was there some kind of bug? Was I just being inexplicably obtuse? It is unclear to me. All in all though, I had a solidly enjoyable time playing this game, and it made a good chunk of a flight from Denver to San Francisco fly by! (pun not intended)