Forensic Necromancy: A Murder in Ninevah, by Daniel M. Stelzer
Liberals like to complain about the current administration’s purge of funding for research and higher education, arguing that a pretended crackdown on “D.E.I.” is actually threatening progress on cures for cancer, new battery and clean-energy technology, programs to help kids read and write, and understanding the history of fascism and how to fight it, not to mention surrendering one of America’s most potent tools for recruiting the best and brightest from across the globe and defunding the public universities that are among the crown jewels of our country to boot. But that’s a small price to pay to stop the deplorable goings-on in Forensic Necromancy, where a shiftless grad student is using research grant money to travel to ancient archeological sites and get so high they think they can see the past – Russ Vought knows “entheogens” are just drugs, he’s ~~read Huxley’s Doors of Perception~~ fed it into an LLM.
Er, more seriously, the record will show that I’m a sucker for Stelzer’s trademarked blend of Bronze-Age history nerdery and sophisticated Dialog features, with last year’s Wise Woman’s Dog being a highlight of the Comp for me. A Murder in Ninevah shares a lot of back-end DNA with its predecessor, with slick quality-of-life touches like an interactive map, hyperlinks for those who don’t want to mess with the parser, an integrated tutorial, and a THINK feature orienting the player towards unsolved puzzles all making it easy to get into and play. But the milieu is fairly distinct – not only does the history here focus on the Neo-Assyrians rather than the Hittites, the aforementioned framing device creates more of a remove: you’re not an active participant in past events, but an observer using your unique techniques to better understand them (and hopefully get a publication out of it).
This could have just been a short prologue helping ease the player into the where and when of the meat of the story, but instead the forensic necromancy conceit is woven throughout proceedings. You explore the past by finding specific human remains and doing a form of psychometry that arranges some of their key memories in your mind palace, a bit of New Age argle-bargle that opens up some fun avenues for puzzles, like seeing someone die in the past and using that to locate their remains in the present which in turn allows you to uncover new memories. Presenting a handful of set-piece memories in spatially-distinct locations also plays to the strengths while avoiding the weaknesses of the parser format – you can wander around and explore them at your leisure, digging into the details, but since each is presented as a frozen moment you can’t engage in conversation or take direct action that would change what happened.
I found the story being uncovered very engaging too. The present-day protagonist’s point of departure is a real-world historical mystery about an assassination plot targeting a Neo-Assyrian king that played out in Ninevah (modern-day Mosul, in Iraq), with a dispossessed son the prime suspect. As you work through the game’s puzzles, you see events proceed both forward and backwards from a few key points, and also get to occupy the perspectives of a few different characters, which leads to some entertaining twists and reversals. Unsurprisingly, the period details are great, with the occasional dry bit of humor helping liven things up:
“His Majesty Siin-ahhe-eriba, Great King, Mighty King, King of the World, King of Assyria, King of the Four Quarters, the capable shepherd, favorite of the Great Gods, guardian of truth, he who loves justice, renders assistance, offers aid to the weak, and strives after good deeds, the Perfect Man, the virile warrior, foremost of all rulers, the bridle that tames the rebellious, the one who strikes his enemies with lightning—”
[The messenger] cuts off abruptly, glancing around. The tone of the crowd has become decidedly hostile.
Situating the action in an imagined mindscape also frees the game from plodding literalism – here’s one of my favorite bits of description:
The architecture here looks Assyrian—it must be Nineveh, the same place your body is in the real world. But the lamassu are taller than a three-story building, the ceilings so high they’re lost in the clouds. This is Nineveh as remembered by its enemies, majestic and imposing, larger than life.
Bits and pieces of a dozen rooms meet at odd angles, columns blocking doorways, hallways slicing through walls. The doorway to the north is grand and richly decorated, while the one to the east is too dark to see.
As for what you do in this fantastic setting – well, it’s largely medium dry goods puzzles. There are locked doors, areas of darkness that need to be illuminated before you can traverse them, mechanisms to fiddle with… they’re nothing you haven’t seen before, and despite the overall smoothness of the experience there were a couple that felt like they could have used another bit of polish to add synonyms and alternate syntax (details in transcript, but [spoiler]LIFT BAR WITH SPEAR[/spoiler] and [spoiler]LIGHT LAMP WITH TORCH[/spoiler] feel like they should have worked without requiring additional hoop-jumping) and one traversal puzzle where I knew exactly what I wanted to do, and after a fair bit of trial and error eventually managed it, but I’m still not quite sure exactly what I did differently the third time that finally made things work.
Those are pretty minor implementation complaints, though – I’m sure future updates will address those rough patches, and in the meantime there are copious clues to help if a player does get temporarily stymied. And given the originality of everything else on display, having puzzles that serve primarily to pace things out and don’t try to steal the spotlight from the exposition and narrative beats is a reasonable choice, even if it is less exciting than the complex magic system of Wise-Woman’s Dog. Forensic Necromancy was a great way to start out the Comp, and heck, I’d be ecstatic about paying my taxes if this was the kind of stuff they funded.
Forensic-Necromancy mr.txt (120.5 KB)