Winter-Over by Emery Joyce
Winter-Over is another strong entry in this year’s surprisingly good roster of mystery/detective games. This time, we’re in the Fiasco playset The Ice. No, wait, we are just in Pickering Station, Antarctica, and that’s a good thing too, because the stuff that happened during the Fiasco game I played… well, you know, what happens in Antarctica stays in Antarctica.
Detective games generally work well when there is a limited setting and set of suspects, and being snowed in in a research base during the Antarctic winter fits that very well. No police will show up for ten days; you are trapped inside with your brother’s murderer; everybody is going crazy from the eternal night; it’s a perfect set-up for some detective work with a slight edge of horror/thriller.
Winter-over leans into that horror/thriller aspect without ever letting it dominate the detective game. We’ve got a stress stat, but managing it isn’t too hard, in part because relaxing and investigating sometimes require the same actions. The protagonist is written as being extremely on edge and reacting weirdly, but never such that his detective work suffers a serious blow. Most importantly, the killer is going to sabotage us in several, quickly escalating ways as the search for truth continues. That gave the game a very dynamic and unpredictable feel that I enjoyed.
I’m not the biggest fan of the interface, because you’re clicking a lot to do even simple things. This is not so noticeable in the initial stages of the game, when you are investigating everything; but it becomes very noticeable later on, when a simple plan like “I need to talk to X” will usually involve first checking the schedule, then clicking several times to move to the desired spot, then talking. And that’s when you know where X is. If you don’t know, you’ll be clicking even more as you try to find them. This made play feel slower than it could have been.
I am a big fan of the evidence structure. I’ve only played the game once, but my sense is that there is a lot of evidence to uncover, including multiple ways to realise that the innocent people are innocent and multiple ways to find out who the guilty person is. I discovered the telephone only relatively late in the game, and managed to unlock it, then show it to someone I had not been suspecting but also had not seen any exonerating evidence for… and they cracked. Just in time! I had only a day left! So that was actually perfect. I can imagine that it’s also possible to find the culprit very soon, or to not find enough evidence on time, and perhaps then the game is less satisfying. But for me it all clicked, even if I never found out why the murderer had murdered my brother.
There’s not a lot more to say, perhaps; this was not a game with super memorable characters or writing or thematic things to say. But it did what it set out to do and did it very well.