Yeah, but English is so limited in its participles! In Ancient Greek you’d have a convenient single word like ἐκπεπτηώς, “those who are now in their current state because they have previously fallen down the stairs”, but in English it’s so clunky.
I’m exaggerating for effect, because in English we do have phrases like “fallen down the stairs”, but saying something like “the fallen-down-the-stairs ghosts” is very…translator-ese.
Ah, yes, pushing someone down the stairs might be the most cliche of methods to make a murder look like an accident…
But it was the ghost investigates their own murder aspect that I latched on to as novel. Usually when the ghost of a murder victim shows up in a story, they know how they died and who it was and they’re either out for revenge or the person investigating their death asks them about how it happened.
At the annual all-England-and-Wales ghost conference, the other spectres did not want to be seen with the terminally unhip crowd of fell-down-the-stairs ghosts.
There’s actually a surprising amount of IF games in which you play as a dead person trying to figure out how you died!
Edit: I decided to create an IFDB poll for it and was able to come up with 7 games loosely fitting the description, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were more.
FYI, there are a few more threads from past years linked from the “clawfoot bathtub” page on IFWiki:
Is terminally unhip a play on the tendency for elderly people to have bones so brittle their hips break under their own weight and this being a common cause of falls in the elderly and terminal being a technical term for a injury or illness that is deadly? Or is that an accidental bit of added word play?
And admittedly, outside of Infocom’s library, I only know a handful of IF titles by name and have played even fewer, so if “ghost investigates their own murder” is more common in IF than other media, no wonder I’m not familiar with it.
I’ve always been a fan of big, sprawling, lighthearted Inform 7 parser games with robust implementation at the beginning (albeit unfortunately weaker toward the end), where you start out exploring a familiar area to get used to the parser, put on some magic glasses, get teleported into a strange liminal space with no clear direction for what to do, follow an NPC’s indirect guidance to get through it, end up in a thoroughly abandoned urban area where the bulk of the game takes place, explore and solve a bunch of puzzles using the bits and pieces of what people left behind (a little bit of time travel and a lot of teleportation are required), fight a boss by using medium-dry-goods parser puzzles but with dramatic stakes and time pressure, then end up back at the initial location for a brief bookend epilogue that resolves the problem that motivated you to explore to begin with—and it’s always nice if they also include an in-game hint system that adds new topics as you discover them in the game, even if the interface for those hint systems ends up annoyingly fiddly to use and I might have preferred a separate HTML file.
So I’m glad to see that both BOSH and Hildy ended up in the top 20!
Yes, I brought up some of this before, but now that the comp is done I can be more detailed about it!
They really are very similar, aren’t they?
Of course, I’ve also been known to enjoy a tense, suspenseful Twine murder mystery with a lot of focus on the characters’ relationships and psychology, where you have a limited amount of time to solve the case (important because characters are in different places at different times, you don’t know their schedules in advance, and all meaningful interactions take up some of this precious time), and you need to not only figure out the killer but have enough evidence to back up your suspicions when you bring the charges to your superiors; also, there’s a stress mechanic that rewards spending some of your precious time doing humanizing things to calm down, because the rest of the game gets difficult if you’re too stressed. Bonus points if the murderer killed the first victim because they threatened to expose a different crime the murderer had committed, and then ended up having to kill again to cover up the first murder, but it wasn’t enough and they were eventually driven to suicidal despair by what they’d done, with the player character having them arrested before they could take that escape from the situation.
So I’m also glad Killings in Wasacona and Winter-Over were both in the top 20!