Miss Gosling’s Last Case by Daniel M. Stelzer
We used to say ‘mystery is hard’ when talking about interactive fiction. But there are several well-done mysteries in this year’s competition, and I’m feeling that maybe the genre has been solved? Not in the sense that there is one true approach – these well-done games are very different from each other – but in the sense that we’ve got enough experience and good design patterns that making a good mystery IF is no longer intrinsically harder than making a good dungeon exploration IF, say.
Miss Gosling’s Last Case is a mystery in the Agatha Christie sub-genre: a smart detective, a less smart police inspector, a rich person’s house as the closely confined setting, a limited list of suspects, and not much action. Of course Christie used to vary on that theme, and so does Stelzer. Most importantly, Miss Marple, I mean Miss Gosling, is dead. The game starts when you find yourself dead at the bottom of the stairs. The police inspector thinks that it’s an accident, but you know you’ve been poisoned. As a ghost, you can’t actually do anything yourself. Luckily, however, your faithful dog can see you; and parser commands are all understood as attempts to tell your (very smart and very well trained) dog to do things.
The game is written in a hybrid style where you can use either clickable links or typed-in parser commands. (The links only look like links, I think; they actually construct and run parser commands.) I started out using the links, but quickly fell back to typing because it is so much faster. I didn’t find a way to remove the box of links that’s taking up screen space, which was slightly irritating. I did find a way to turn off the immensely intrusive hints that attempt to spoil the first puzzle for you even when you’re not yet stuck. (Hint: type ‘hints off’.)
But those were the only irritations. Once it gets going, Miss Gosling’s Last Case is fun, engaging, well-written, fair, logical, and solid. The puzzles all make sense and reward experimentation. For me, they were at the exact right level of difficulty. This was probably my best puzzle experience of the competition.
I also like that you’re spending most of the game trying to prove the innocence of people. Only at the end do we get a twist where we need to catch the real culprit – whose guilt does cast some doubt on the supposedly superior knowledge of people of Miss Gosling. But it’s satisfying. You’ve also been taught all the skills that are necessary to solve the climactic puzzle, which is a mechanism I really appreciate.
So, this is not a mystery game that ends with you having to choose whom to accuse, unlike Winter-Over and The Killings in Wasacona. It’s more a traditional puzzle game with a mystery flavour. But as far as I’m concerned, Miss Gosling’s Last Case proves that that is a perfectly good approach to the genre.