Artful Deceit by James O’Reilly, co-written by Dian Mills O’Reilly
Playtime: 1 hour, 30 minutes
TLDR: You’re an old-school gumshoe investigating the murder of your rich, art-world client in this retro puzzler.
Gamemechanical notes: OK, more of these than usual, so:
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Having already used my “I wasn’t sure how to start this game” joke, let’s just say that, having never emulated a Commodore 64 game before, simply opening the game was a puzzle for me. In case anyone else is in the same boat, after downloading the VICE emulator, you need to open the game file from the x64sc.exe file (found in the “bin” folder of the VICE materials). There’s a short note about this on page 5 of the Artful Deceit manual, I also skimmed this video before I found that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Mfu1kOC4Bw
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Thanks @Denk for making some suggestions to make the game run better on the emulator. I don’t understand the details, but following these instructions reduced delays for me. Artful Deceit - emulator settings
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I would recommend saving, my game crashed once and I needed to reload a saved file.
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Once I figured out how to run the game, I went straight in and started playing. Learn from my cautionary tale because that was the WRONG choice. Instead, you want to start by reading the game manual, the “Feelies” (?? not a term I’m familiar with), and the command list before you start playing the game. All of those are found in the downloaded files that came with the game.
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Finally, I presumptuously assume you will want to know the following:
(i) there’s an “analyze ____” command (this is listed in the command list, but cannot be over-emphasized)
(ii) there’s a second location you can visit (the gallery) using the command “drive to ___” while at your car (you can also drive back to the house)
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This game has a fun vibe (the opening description “as dusk gives way to the inky darkness of night, a luminous moon casts an eerie glow over the sprawling, luxurious community . . .” really working to set a noir mood)
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The concept of “investigate these pretentious rich people’s art-adjacent murder” has a lot of promise (see Glass Onion, sort of?).
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I quite enjoyed the flashlight filter puzzle. At first, when I saw the circuit breaker in the house, I was like “hmm, I wonder why the game wants me to think about turning off the power” and it was fun to see that played out.
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I was intrigued to hear at the beginning that the player character is noteworthy for being disheveled and having people underestimate them, but I didn’t really see this reflected in how the NPCs react to the player character.
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Interviewing is certainly important in the game—I would have enjoyed going even deeper/hearing even more colorful material from the NPCs. There were enough topics that weren’t implemented that it sort of discouraged spending a long time trying to talk to the NPCs.
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My gameplay notes above probably raise several inferences about the roadblocks I hit with the game. (That’s what we call “environmental storytelling.” This writing thing is easy.) I think without those roadblocks I would have had a quite fun experience. As it was, I still had a fun experience, but one frequently interspersed with “!?!”