A real eclectic bunch this time.

Inside: Inspector Schmidt: A Bavarian Tale, Overboard!, Detective Case and Clown Bot in: Murder in the Hotel Lisbon, On Your Tail, Little Locked Rooms, Emerald City Confidential

The recs are Inspector Schmidt and Emerald City

CW: One of the games uses a homophobic slur and I briefly talk about it.

Inspector Schmidt: A Bavarian Tale
(Active Fungus Studios, 2023)

This falls into that difficult category of, “I really liked it but it’s hard to recommend.” One of the tough things I’ve found about these kinds of detective games is that suggesting an LP really removes a lot of the choice elements that make them compelling. I do think going along for the ride with this one would still be worthwhile, but a lot of its tone is definitely tied up in the different ways you can choose to pursue the plot and you lose that with an LP.

Let’s get the bad out of the way: the technical aspects of this game are terrible. It’s so poorly optimized that my computer was insanely overheated the entire time I was playing in a way it hasn’t been with any other game. For a game that looks and plays like Morrowind but came out in 2023, that’s mind-boggling. Further, there’s just a real excess of gameplay elements. I don’t know that much about the engine that was used, but I wonder if some of the gameplay pieces here were premade and included because they could be, as I can’t come up with any other reason for the surfeit of systems in place here. The entire item-collecting mechanic was pointless; the vast, vast majority of items were unuseable and I ended the game with an inventory with well over a hundred bits of junk. The barter system was similarly pointless; at no point did I need to purchase anything, so I don’t know why there were shops or money. The stamina mechanic was insane; it just meant you have to stop investigating every 30 seconds to use a consumable that was nearly infinite anyway, and there was one mana-looking bar that I don’t even know what it did. The fistfighting was pointless, especially because there was also a stealth mechanic that you were supposed to be using to avoid fights anyway. There was just so much gameplay bloat.

A game where you talked to people with occasional stealth sections where you found clues and eavesdropped would have made for a better game. Literally nothing else was necessary.

The one functional system, the skill checks, was also bafflingly put together. For one, I cannot understand why you had to pass each skill check 4 consecutive times. I genuinely don’t understand why anyone would design a game this way. Additionally, there were way too many stats — why were agility and dexterity separate? Literally what was the difference? Why were Charisma and Insight split into five different stats??? It meant assigning skill points was a crapshoot because there was never any way to know which of the 47 Charisma checks was going to be the one you needed. It should have been Strength, Agi, Charisma, Insight and that’s it! Whyyyyyyyyyyy

There are some gameplay things I liked. I loved that you could bypass skill checks if you had the right information — that was excellent and I’m honestly baffled no one else has come up with that system. I also thought the rock-paper-scissors tone system was clever, if unrefined — the idea that a good detective would change their approach based on the suspect’s personality is a really neat thing to implement, though it did make Schmidt seem a bit mercenary — not necessarily a bad thing, though. And A+ for the fast-travel system (though the map was far, far bigger than it needed to be and didn’t have a map marker for your current location… I repeatedly got lost in the woods).

But the real selling points here are the setting and plot. The game takes place in 19th-century Bavaria, and the setting is just so unique and perfect for this kind of story, and the team knew exactly what to do with it. One of the reasons I love country-house mysteries is that they’re fundamentally a critique of manners — the heart of the country-house killing is that something horrible has happened somewhere idyllic, and the investigation involves getting into the ways that people’s appearances don’t line up with their actions; people aren’t the same in the town square as they are behind closed doors. The dirty secret of the country house is that there are dirty secrets, but we live in a society that can’t deal with that, and so the detective has to take things over from the police because they know human nature in a way institutions, which are invested in the appearances, fundamentally can’t.

The decision to have Schmidt be a kind of census-taker (really, an anthropologist in modern terms, I think) whose job is about parsing the realities of people’s lives for an institution that will always reduce them is a really great iteration of this. The ending sequence where you hear your superior whitewash the whole thing was great. This game really knows what this subgenre is for, the questions it’s best at asking.

I actually don’t want to say too much because for all the problems with the gameplay, I really, really enjoyed the story of this game, found the people to be compelling and complex, and I genuinely think it’s worth tolerating the weird and bad gameplay choices for the experience of investigating this town and its people. This is the only country-house-style mystery I’ve run into so far and it’s so great to see it done well and taken seriously, to see it aptly and consciously use this 19th-century setting to bring up problems we still have, to think about the roles institutions play in our lives and they myriad ways they can fail us. This is a subgenre that’s rarely taken seriously and this is such a unique take on it that I found it to be a complete treat.

There’s a sequel game with a free standalone demo (the only good kind of demo imo) and I’m definitely going to play both. I would even if I knew the gameplay experience was exactly the same. I just enjoyed the mystery itself that much.

Overboard!
(inkle ltd, 2021)

Oh man, what a crazy disappointment. I’d enjoyed 80 Days and was blown away by Heaven’s Vault, so I was really looking forward to this game, which is kind of a reverse-detective story where you play as a socialite who murders her husband and has to get away with it. But it was just so tiny and boring. Each run of the story is only about 15 minutes long and it involves going through the same small actions over and over. The cast is tiny and bland and winning is stupidly easy; I escaped on my very first run.

The most frustrating part is that what you needed to do for a perfect run is immediately obvious after one playthrough, it’s just a question of choosing your dialogue options in the right order, so there’s nothing actually fun or interesting about replaying it. I know I need to get the earring before Carstairs, so I just have to by guess-check-revise figure out when he finds it; I know I need the master key so I just have to redo the Captain’s dialogue until I get it; I know I need to plant evidence so I just have to wait around til I’m sure how long the old lady is away from her room; etc. The wires are too visible to be interesting and the short as balls playtime means there’s this Sisyphean element where it feels like I’m doing the exact same thing over and over and over, because I am. The game acts like the characters having “secrets” is supposed to motivate me, but the game is too short to make me interested; the characters are necessarily simple archetypes because the player has to be able to grasp them instantly, so they’re not compelling.

Just… ugh. And for that price, geez, what robbery.

Detective Case and Clown Bot in: Murder in the Hotel Lisbon
(Nerd Monkeys, 2014)

This is one of those “humor” games where all of the jokes are aimed at 12-year-olds and the game is for some reason incredibly smug about this. It’s the kind of game that thinks “women are stupid lol” is a joke and pointing out that the word “homocide” has “homo” in it is funny. Then I got to the part where you have to question the manager of the “GAF Bar” and the “””joke””” is that you call him “FAG” and you know what? No. No, you don’t get to call people slurs and keep my attention. Fuck off.

Little Locked Rooms
(riolucci, 2024)

The first of the anime-VN-style games I’ve played. There’s so damn many of these but I haven’t been super interested in playing them just yet.

This game was just okay. The basic premise is that you have a small diorama of a locked room mystery and have to figure it out. The frame story is the dioramas are made by a dad for his son and daughter to test their mettle with. You solve the mysteries via dialogue options and by clicking on items in the dioramas. The idea is nice, but a few things held it back and I ended up underwhelmed.

For one, it has some really tired and grating character cliches. It has both the “serious little boy studying for his career while little girl is bubbleheaded and careless” thing, as well as the “girl is competent and boy can’t believe it and says she’s just a lying cheater.” These are bad tropes. There was no reason for this game to be sexist about children and it was really irritating. It also decided to make the “thief” in the first story dark-skinned which was… A Choice. I’m shocked no one pointed out the optics of some of this to the developer because this was like “don’t be a dick 101” kind of stuff.

The bigger problem for me was that two of the mysteries were ones I knew. I recognized the theatre one instantly — I can’t quite figure out where I know it from but the game even says it’s an old story, so who knows where I saw it. The final case is just a John Dickson Carr story, “The Shadow of the Goat.” I haven’t read it but I must have read about it at some point because it was extremely familiar to me from the getgo. It’s disappointing for the game to not have tried to come up with its own plots, and somehow I get the feeling Carr’s writing wasn’t used with permission, which feels not great — I also find it kind of iffy to only credit him in a line in the end credits when it would have been so easy to have the dad character say, “This one is based on a short story I like,” which feels more honest to me. This is such a tiny game — four plots, finished in 77 minutes — that it feels pretty egregious the dev couldn’t come up with something original. It makes me wonder if the other two were recycled stories as well — I recognized the solution to the first one, but assumed at the time it was just an old mystery trope; now I wonder if it was lifted wholesale from a specific story that wasn’t credited.

If all that doesn’t bother you, you may get something out of this game, which does have a very cute premise and runs well enough, but to me it felt like kind of a waste of the idea.

Emerald City Confidential
(Wadjet Eye Games, 2009)

I quite liked this little game! Maybe the first Blackwell game really was just ‘the bad one’ in the Wadjet Eye catalogue. I’ll have to check out Unbound next.

The caveat is that I know fuckall about Wizard of Oz canon and so can’t comment on it as fanfic or fixfic.

As a point-and-click, though, it was well-design and fun, and as a not-super-serious detective story I enjoyed it. I particularly liked the way the game escalates by having you take on cases that end up being more and more interconnected — you start out taking on relatively low-stakes things and then very naturally find yourself trying to stop a war. Each solution is actually a bigger question, and it worked well. And it was so nicely intuitive and solvable! The puzzle design here was really excellent, there’s no need to play it with a guide open or anything. Honestly these early Wadjet games are the best case for this era being the genre’s ‘golden age’ I’ve ever seen — usually when people say that they’re talking about quantity and not quality, but these are the best, most interesting point-and-clicks I’ve ever played.

While this game’s setting meant it was lighter in tone than the other games, the ending was honestly pretty heavy and I appreciated the questions it asked about the reality of sacrifice-few-for-many logics. And in true genre fashion it also asks some important questions about power and responsibility and corruption. I can see the guy who wrote The Shivah in this game, even if it’s not meant to be that intense. There’s meat here.

I did find the art to be weaker than the other Wadjet games I’ve seen, though it’d obviously because they were trying to capture a certain era of illustration and animation. It wasn’t my aesthetic, but I get what they were going for. Still, I think their pixel art was much stronger.

What is it with Wizard of Oz fanfic, anyway? Why is that like the One Legitimate Form of Fanfic? So weird.

On Your Tail
(Memorable Games, 2024)

In her review of The Rise of Skywalker, Jenny Nicholson says (paraphrasing), “The worst thing an ending can do is make you feel stupid for getting invested in the first place.” It’s an insightful and compact way to think about narrative disappointment. It is also how this game made me feel: foolish and sad.

Here’s what I wanted to say about this game: This is a wonderful, fun, unique, gorgeous-looking game. It seamlessly blends life sim elements and mystery elements, and its scenario-editing deduction game, while it could be clunky and needed some QOL improvements, was fun and unique. There was an enormous amount of effort put into populating the town and making it feel alive, and slowly uncovering the more serious history of the place was satisfying. It made me so homesick for the seaside and Italian food and community, which is perhaps why I got so attached, but man, bless the furries they do some great stuff.

Here’s what I have to say instead: The ending of this game is so bad that it marred the entire experience I’d had up til that point. I stayed up late to finish it and was so visibly disappointed when I went to bed Mr. Act noticed I was upset. I felt not just cheated narratively, but like my time had been wasted and the game had never taken my investment seriously. I felt stupid for having been so excited about the game at all.

I won’t spoil it in case someone is morbidly curious, but to me it was in the “it was all a dream/none of it was real” genre of terrible twists, where it just invalidates everything so much and switches genre so suddenly that not only did it come from nowhere and mean nothing, it instantly made me stop caring. It wasn’t a twist, it was lie. And I’d loved the game so much up until that point that it felt like this kind of weird… betrayal, almost? That sounds dramatic, but it’s true.

I was going to write up a big thing about the history of fair play in mysteries and when breaking the rules works and why it felt so horrible here, but honestly I’m just so bummed about the whole thing that I don’t want to talk about it. I should be able to rec this to everyone and I can’t and that sucks.