Thank you so much for taking the time to read a new/unknown IF author and for writing a thoughtful review. I do have audio files for the songs that I was not able to include because I used Melox.ai to create them, which I verified would violate the no player-facing AI content rule for IFComp. So I included the songs as lyrics only, which were all written by me. In a few weeks, I’ll upload a version of the story to my website (zstudioscoop dot com) that has the songs embedded in the story.
I’ve enjoyed exploring this year’s entries and seeing the breadth of exploration in the format and will post a couple reviews of my favorites next week.
Ryan Veeder’s Agatha Christie’s the Murder on the Orient Express by Ryan Veeder
The front half of this game reminds me of Blue’s Clues. I am a touch too old for Blue’s Clues, but my younger brother wasn’t, so I watched a lot of it as a kid. If you aren’t familiar with the show, a guy in a green striped shirt wanders around his house looking for “clues” left behind by his blue dog*. That’s kind of what you do in the game (minus the blue dog). The clues aren’t actually anything. This was a bit confusing at first. They are just points you collect to move onto gated areas of the game. You usually find clues looking at all the nouns you can, which is usually easy to do. Sometimes you have to be eagle eyed to spot a noun you wouldn’t think to interact with, and sometimes you have to try maybe another verb.
There are more difficult puzzles that develop in the later part of the game. Their difficulty derives from the challenge of simply remembering a thing you haven’t interacted with in awhile and how it had a suggestion of how to interact with it that is now relevant with new information. I’m not very good at remembering things, so this was sufficiently challenging, though I began taking notes halfway through and that helped immensely. I think the challenge of it was just hard enough that it engaged me, but not so hard that I became disinterested, so I did manage to take it all the way to the true ending with just a smidge of peeking at the source code. The game does let you exit waaaay before that in many different ways if you like. I didn’t find any of those early endings very satisfying.
I put this game off because I have never read an Agatha Christie novel and I assumed it would be more tied into that source material, but I don’t think it really is? I have no opinions on Christie, so it is difficult to draw conclusions about what this work is saying about Murder on the Orient Express or any of her other works, other than obviously leveraging some of the scenery, characters, and time period. There were a few times the writing in the game made me genuinely laugh out loud (namely reading the guidebook on the street in Calais). Overall it was a solidly engaging experience, though I didn’t feel much emotionally from the ending.
*Heck both Blue’s Clues and this game involve jumping into books, now that I think about it…
