The Litchfield Mystery
Originally a genre that was seen as extremely hard to do well in IF, mystery has grown to be a popular and successful part of the contemporary IF scene. The Litchfield Mystery gives us the most classic of all setups: a British mansion, a dead rich guy, a limited number of suspects, and a brilliant detective who will solve the case.
Gameplay mainly takes the form of lawn mowering one’s way through all the options. Go to every location, click every object, talk to every person, click every question. This is not inherently very engaging, so the game will have to keep you interested by sharing titbits of information that make you think. For the most part, The Litchfield Mystery does a fair job of that. We slowly start building a mental picture of the situation; we see a few connections; it kept me engaged throughout the process of walking around the house and interviewing the suspects.
(Take note: all my reviews are spoilery, but hereafter I will be spoiling more or less everything about this mystery!)
But after the initial stage, the game didn’t quite work for me. There were, I think, three main things involved in that. First, I found the central puzzle extremely obscure. You are given a riddle that you should solve to open the safe. But this riddle is not specific enough; it could have been ‘tree’ or ‘house’ or a hundred other things. I would never have guessed ‘sailing boat’, not does it seem obvious once you know it is the intended answer. What’s more, it makes no sense at all that Litchfield would use this method for giving his safe code to his wife, because it’s clearly ineffective!
The second thing that hampered my enjoyment of the game is the inability to confront the suspects with the evidence. I find evidence of financial malfeasance, but I can’t ask anyone about that. I find that an African snake’s poison has been used, but I cannot ask the African snake expert about that. (It is, by the way, absurdly stupid that Hansel uses the one method of killing that immediately indicates that she is the killer.) I find out that the business partner entered the study after Litchfield died but did not raise an alarm… and I also can’t ask him about that! It’s really weird that I can confront some of the suspects with very minor evidence and questions, but that when I start making real discoveries, my powers of investigation disappear.
My third complaint is that there are several strange inconsistencies that you cannot investigate. Hansel’s passport indicates that she made a trip to South Africa that lasted six days. But a trip to South Africa in the 1930s will take more like a month, so she clearly did not really go to South Africa. Why not? What is going on? Why can’t I find out? The cook tells me that she imports her snake meat from Asia; but it’s fresh snake meat in the fridge, not dried snake meat, so this is a fairly unbelievable story. While refrigerated meat ships were had been in use for decades at this time, as far as I can see they were not going from Asia to the UK, and would also not have carried individual customer packages. I might be wrong, but it seems suspicious, and I thought it was strange I could not investigate this further. And how could she get pufferfish from Japan?
Anyway, with copious use of the hints that are hidden in the About text (spoiling especially the riddle) I managed to get to the accuse sequence, and I made the right guesses. But they were guesses. Informed guesses, to be sure, but the evidence I had was extremely limited and surely not enough to convict Hansel. I felt like an amateur desperate to make it good, rather than the crack detective I’m supposed to be. Although one may wonder why I’m supposed to get Hansel behind bars. Tabitha’s review very perceptively points out the dubious moral situation here. The game does at one point give me a motive, but unfortunately it is in the single most purple passage of prose I have so far seen in the competition:
That’s hard to take seriously.
That’s a lot of criticism, in terms of word count, but most of it could be easily fixed. I feel that The Litchfield Mystery is about 80% of the way to a game that I would really like. Iron out the historical inconsistencies (if that is what they are), add some interactivity with the suspects, improve the obscure riddle, and perhaps give us a moral choice at the end – perhaps we tip off Hansel and allow her to flee, if we choose – and this would be great. As it is, it is still enjoyable.