The Killings in Wasacona by Steve Kollmansberger
It is a truth universally acknowledged that designing Murder mystery games are hard. Here’s just one devilish design decision that you have to make. At the end of the game, when the accusing happens, do you:
- Only allow the player to accuse someone when they have found enough evidence to back that up?
- Allow the player to accuse whomever they want, but then rebuke them for their choice if they did not have enough evidence?
- Allow the player to accuse whomever they want, and then run with it.
Kollmansberger chooses the third, and I found it a mixed blessing. On my first playthrough of the game, I was allowed to accuse someone even though I had nothing like enough evidence against him. It was probably better than not being allowed to accuse him – and it gave me the positive message that I had solved three of the murders – but it did feel very unrealistic. I had vague suspicions, but really not much more.
On my second playthrough, I had a great case and basically achieved everything that was good except saving the fourth victim. (I wonder how one can even do that. Keep patrolling in the night even though you have to sleep? I don’t think there’s enough time to find and arrest the killer on the first day.) So that was nice. But it would have been nicer if I had just played better, possibly by using knowledge from the first game. That was not the case, however. I had just succeeded at more rolls. And the reason I succeeded at more rolls is that during the first game, I learned that not all skill are created equal. There are like, only two or three physical checks in the entire game, while there seem to be dozens of Academics and Percpetion checks. I put +6 in Academics and +3 in Perception, -6 in Physical and -3 in Intimidation, and suddenly I was finding evidence all over the place. Nice! Well, I mean, kind of. But not really. It was just luck and gaming the system.
I think the addition of a luck factor is a net positive for the game. Just giving out all the clues would take away the feeling that you’re working with a non-predetermined partial set of evidence; and making it deterministic which clues you’ll get would take away some of the tension. But I think there’s a fairly obvious way to make the system more interactive and give the player more agency, more of a reward for their detective sense. It is this: give the player a limited number of ‘automatic success’ tokens, to be used before a roll. Maybe three tokens. Then at every roll you will have to decide whether this one is so important that you want to use one of your tokens. I think that would work marvellously. Are you gonna blow it on a stupid racist search for drugs in the clearly-not-a-drug-user’s apartment? Or will you use it to find the murder weapon where you probably intuit that it must be hidden?
Let me say, though, that overall The Killings in Wasacona was a very positive surprise. It’s the right size, there’s the right amount of people and locations, the right amount of information per location, enough connection between them, just enough opening up of new options, a time limit that isn’t too tight, and – most importantly – the right clues to make the case solvable but not too obvious. Murder mysteries are hard, but this one was done very well. It’s not the kind of mystery where we really delve into the psychology of the characters, or unearth the hidden social dynamics of the town; it’s more a straightforward police procedural than a grumpy-British-detective-who-is-in-an-existential-crisis-and-the-current-case-will-force-him-to-reflect-on-his-own-troubles type thing. In that sense its aims are not too high. But they don’t need to be, because a game like this is perfectly enjoyable, and enjoy it I very much did.
There could be a further round of proofreading. One of the first screens told me: “you’re excited and relived to have graduated from the FBI Academy.” I also ran into an early “You recall back to” (should be “You recall”), a “per-say” (should be “per se”), and the phrase “She contested she charges”. Nothing too troublesome, but it could be polished away.