A Death in Hyperspace by Stewart C Baker, Phoebe Barton, James Beamon, Kate Heartfield, Isabel J. Kim, Sara S. Messenger, Nacarat, Natalia Theodoridou, M. Darusha Wehm, and Merc Fenn Wolfmoor
That’s a lot of authors for what is not a particularly big game, but perhaps they each wrote one of the characters? For this is a murder mystery in (what at first sight appears to be) a classic vein, and a murder mystery needs a lot characters – as suspects. There’s no good whodunnit without a large number of whos that might have dun it. And so it’s your job as the space ship’s AI to find out where the characters are, collect two clues about each of them, and then decide which of them to accuse.
Interestingly, there doesn’t seem to be any truth to be found; or rather, whomever you choose to accuse, it will always be presented as the right person. It feels a little more canonical to decide that the captain died from natural causes, in part because it’s asymmetric compared to the other endings, and in part because you only unlock it on your second playthrough. Otherwise, though, anything goes. That’s fine. The traditional murder mystery where all is revealed at the end is way too comforting; it’s good to shake things up once in a while, and this is a way of shaking things up that requires the medium of interactive fiction, so it’s a good fit. More could have been done with the moral implications of the baseless accusations that we indulge in in most endings, but I guess the authors wanted to keep things light-hearted.
Having said all of that, I’m afraid I must mention that my time with the game was quite horrible. You’re put on a thirty minute real world timer. Really! So I was reading as fast as I could (skipping what seemed to be skippable), manically clicking on links to see if clues had been revealed somewhere, not making notes because I felt I had no time for that, getting utterly confused about the many characters as a result, and being very very frustrated by the fact that clues kept proliferating without pointing in a clear direction. As I said, I appreciate having a murder mystery where the clues proliferate The Crying of Lot 49-style and never get us to some objective truth. But I appreciate this a whole lot less when it’s coupled with a real world time limit and my stress levels keep rising and rising with absolutely no pay-off. When I finally clicked the ‘solve the mystery’ button, at least partly because I wanted the experience of playing the game to just stop, it also turned out that I could not in fact accuse anyone, which added a massive anticlimax to my utter stress. After reading some posts on this forum, I understood that one first has to use the ‘murderboard’ and put one of the characters on ‘high’, but that’s something the game never clearly explains.
I made two more playthroughs after that, but now it just seemed to become an exercise in finding two clues per character, accusing them, and collecting another ending for your trophy case. At that point I quickly lost interest.
This, then, is a hard game to judge for me. I appreciate its general aim. The writing is fine. Technically, everything is in order. But three things stand between me and a positive judgement. First, and least importantly, more could have been done with the ethical and judicial questions that are being raised by our ability to make baseless accusations. Second, I’m really unsure about the wisdom of relying on a ‘collect all the endings’ shape for the game and the deep structural symmetries that this requires. Finding ‘the conversation clue’ and ‘the physical clue’ for each suspect is a fairly mechanical exercise, which one does while not even reading the prose any more. Third and most importantly, I had a really bad experience playing A Death in Hyperspace, due entirely to the timer – which, in hindsight, I feel is a completely unnecessary addition to the piece. I engaged with it believing that the authors were in good faith, and that they had designed a challenge which would be more interesting and satisfying when done with a real world timer. But they were not in good faith. There was no challenge; there was only me, producing stress hormones, clicking as fast as I could, being the butt of their joke.
Edited to add: I’m a little sad that I focused so much on my struggles with the game and didn’t really comment on what is perhaps more interesting – and well described by DemonApologist here – , namely the experience of playing this obviously naive AI whose reading of murder mysteries completely structures the way they see the situation. It’s like Northanger Abbey, except mystery instead of romance.
There is of course something fairly hilarious about the inane questions and accusations that form most of one’s dialogue options. Underneath the somewhat mechanical mystery, there is a poignant little comedy playing out, where the player character is too blinded by grief and excitement to see the plain truth: that the captain died of natural causes. That’s ultimately the point of the game.
Also check out the thread about the game.