+: Detective Di: The Silk Rose Murders, Later Alligator, Lockheart Indigo
-: Why Am I Dead at Sea, The Raven, Night Call
Why Am I Dead at Sea
(Peltast Games, 2015)
This game was… weird, in a lot of ways.
So on the gameplay front I actually quite liked it. This is exactly what I was hoping MURDERED SOUL SUSPECT TM would be — you’re a ghost who can possess people, read minds, get into locked rooms, manipulate objects, etc. The game seems to have been made in an RPGMaker/Wolfrpg/etc. engine (I spent way too much time trying to figure out which one and couldn’t) and has the clunkiness you’d expect from that, but aside from that I enjoyed floating around and talking to people and using different people to access different areas etc.
That said… well. There is a long-running meme in fandom culture known as the Eight Deadly Words, coined by SFF author Dorothy Jones Heydt: “I don’t care what happens to these people.” The idea is that a narrative has fundamentally failed when the reader stops caring about the characters.
I hated everyone in this game. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a cast populated by such terrible, unlikeable, whiny-ass people. While Xu and Marcurio were the worst, everyone sucked in their own way. The only person who was sympathetic was Gwen, but she spends large swaths of the game either refusing to or unable to communicate. Xu really was the worst, just insufferable. Walking around talking about how she objectively has the hardest life, ever, and it justifies her doing as many terrible things as she wants, all while the game acts like she’s a totally normal person — I have no idea how you end up writing a character like this without a hint of irony.
I initially thought the direction the game was going was that everyone was going to realize they were all so caught up in the idea that their problems were uniquely difficult only to realize that they were, literally, all in the same boat, and were better served by tackling hardship together instead of seeing each other as competition. Community as resistance etc etc. Like, this is so obviously the direction this should go that the “same boat” metaphor is right there, it literally takes place on a boat, but that just… never happens. In fact, not only do the characters never really open up to each other, they don’t grow or change or learn anything. We never even find out why Alton is so anxious and suddenly flunked school, why Donovan left the cops, why Marcurio feels like he can’t get a job anywhere else, why Paulo is psychic (???), what happened to the captain to make her take this job so suddenly, what happened to the old captain… the list goes on. And none of them learn anything from the experience — there are functionally only two endings here, and no matter how fully you solve the mystery it doesn’t change that everyone ends exactly where they started. And no one faces any consequences! Xu and Marcurio have been aiding and abetting a human trafficking operation, only technically not realizing when anyone with a functioning brainstem would have because they were sticking their fingers in their ears and going LA LA LA, and you expect me to believe they just get to walk away??
Huge swaths of the cast just repeat that they don’t care about anything that’s going on and just want to be left alone, a baffling decision, and no one seems concerned that there’s no one to drive the boat, it’s just bonkers. The only likeable person is actually the ghost, but the silent-protag thing means that we don’t really get to engage with them — the whole thing would have been better with, say, between-chapter cutscene flashbacks showing the captain investigating. She seemed cool, but her being dead before we get there means we can’t attach ourselves to her.
And the endings were so annoying. There’s no way to save right before the final confrontation, you have to go through a long, unskippable sequence each time, and infuriatingly, despite claiming there are five endings, there are only two — I was SO irritated to go through all the effort of seeing the best one only to find out it was exactly the same as the other 2 partially-good endings. Though that no one reacts differently no matter what happens does feel on brand for these terrible, terrible people.
More irritatingly, the game just… never follows up on Paolo and the captain, lol? In the bad ends, you see Paolo as like a vegetable or whatever, but in the good ones you don’t see him at all?? And in none of the endings do we find out what happened to the ghost. Is she still haunting the ship…? Did she just vanish after the denouement? Did she ascend into heaven? Is she with Paolo? Who the fuck knows, she’s only the main character.
The plot here was decent. I found it to be predictable and it was clear who the culprit was early. I continue to not enjoy sexual abuse as a way to signal a story is serious without any examination of the culture that produces it; I find it both emotionally manipulative and dismissive. The game seemed to want to say something about mental health, and its portrayal of Gwen and Darryl were good and sensitive, but it couldn’t help but edge into “you can cure PTSD with ghosts” stuff which is always irritating.
But honestly the biggest problem is just how completely unlikable the characters were. The biggest disappointment for me was that in the worst ending some of them still survive, I wanted them all shot down.
Detective Di: The Silk Rose Murders
(Nupixo, 2019)
So when I played the above game I was initially going to include a section about why serial killer stories aren’t detective stories, but it honestly ended up not mattering in the face of how terrible all the characters were. But basically, when you think about types of narrative conflict, good detective stories are typically person vs person leading into person vs society. But serial killer stories are virtually always written as person vs nature, because the killer is dehumanized and decontextualized, stripped of any motive — they’re just crazy, just evil, just in it for the lulz. There’s not really any difference between this type of story and a ‘cthulu did it’ story; in both, there’s fundamentally no motive and no possibility to truly know the other. The only way to have a true conflict in a serial killer story would have to involve unpacking the fact that, in real life, serial killers overwhelmingly and aggressively target women — especially poor, nonwhite, noncisgendered etc women. The story would have to meaningfully unpack that, place the serial killer back in its cultural context and actually explore motivations instead of just being a stranger in the alleyway. But these stories are just about macho men posturing at each other and as such have no room for this kind of critique.
When I was first drafting the ‘Dead at Sea’ post, I intended to end that explanation with, “If any serial killer games actually end up deconstructing serial killing as endgame misogyny I’ll eat my socks.” I am very, very glad I didn’t write that, lol, because I would be cooking sock a la mode right now.
I really loved this game. It takes place in Tang Dynasty China, just before and at the start of the reign of Wu Zeitan, China’s only woman emperor — so the end of the 7th century CE. You play as Di Renjie, a young magistrate who’s functionally a police investigator. The game follows Di as he works through four interconnected murder cases and navigates the intense politics of Tang China.
It’s a fun piece of historical fiction and a well-designed point-and-click puzzle-adventure game. I found the pixel art to be clear and appealing, if not terribly deep, and the story was really well-constructed. It was just a good time, so if AGS-style games are your jam, you should go check it out!
I want to talk about the ending–
So the four cases all involve young women being killed brutally by someone who is clearly a serial killer. The women are strangled and then have their hearts cut out, resulting in horrific crime scenes. While at first nothing seems to connect the victims, you eventually realize that all of them were MIA until about two months prior to the events of the game.
I initially was assuming it was that typical thing that they were sex workers and were being killed for trying to return to their families or marrying as fallen women, but the game went in a far more interesting direction. It turns out the four women worked as personal assassins and bodyguards to Wu Zeitan, and the five women’s explicit goal was to put Wu on the throne as the first woman emperor. They were extremely close and dedicated to their political goals. You’ll initially led to believe that Wu may have ordered a hit on one of them, betraying them, but it actually turns out the woman was willing to kill herself for a mission because the cause was so important to her.
At the end, you find out the serial killer is a man from one of the women’s hometowns who felt betrayed when she refused to marry him and instead dedicated herself to the cause, and was the one who sacrificed herself. He decides to kill the remaining women and the emperor as ‘revenge’ for ‘brainwashing’ her into their cause. It’s a really great incel-critique plot, about how men punish women’s ambition and refuse to grant them agency.
I also really liked Wu’s point at the end that political assassinations were only a scandal for her and wouldn’t have been for a man on the throne, and how she has to tread so much more carefully in order for her rule to be legitimate.
However, Di’s ultimate decision to keep her secret but basically say ‘please don’t put me in this position again’ felt… weak, to me? This may just be me and my preference for more scathing critique, but I felt like Wu going, “Everyone’s standards are different for me,” and then Di basically being like, “Not mine, but I’ll keep your secret this one time,” felt… I don’t know, just thematically weak. Di has been our moral compass throughout the game, and him leaving the question of whether Wu was doing something unusual for an emperor hanging just left the ending feeling very flat to me. I wanted him to take a stand one way or another, to say either, “Yeah, you’re right, you don’t have free rein here, but you’re making things even harder by putting me in this position, so let me help you strategize,” or to just suddenly be a bit of a hypocrite and argue with her about men like him holding her to a higher standard, let him be flawed. Instead he doesn’t really commit to anything and it was kind of an emotional letdown for me. But again, this may not be a totally fair critique, as I’m pretty uncharitable about this kind of stuff, lol.
Regardless, I really enjoyed the whole experience here, and it was really nice to actually see a game use a serial killer plot to make these exact points.
Unfortunately it looks like the dev has had trouble securing funding for a followup game, which really sucks. Instead, they recently kickstarted a novel adaptation of this game and teased a novelization of the sequel, which they’ve already planned out. Unfortunately I missed the pledge window, but I’m definitely curious to see how this adapts and where they go next with the premise, so I’ll keep an eye on it. And I’d really love to see a followup happen someday!
The Raven
(King ART, 2013)
That’s it, that’s the entire review.
The only good I can say is that I realized what was happening about halfway in and was able to go, “Wait, they’re not really…”, then confirm my worst fears and peace out. I would have been furious if I’d been fully invested and played the whole way through.
Later Alligator
(SmallBu, 2019)
This game is so fun and adorable. I loved it.
Later Alligator is about Pat, a paranoid guy living in Alligator New York City, who becomes convinced his family is plotting to kill him. While treating himself to a birthday stay in a nice hotel, he meets you, and asks you to help him: go meet all his family members and talk to them to find out about the mysterious Event that will be taking place later that day. To get them to talk to you, you have to do them small favours or defeat them at something, resulting in a unique minigame.
It has delightful hand-drawn animation and the designs have so much personality and brightness. I would often just watch the animations play out and click on things just to see them move. I also loved it as a kind of homage to NYC culture and color. The writing was genuinely funny — I particularly enjoyed the text-message exchanges between you and Pat. It’s meta, and could be too meta, but the charm carries it off, as does the fact that it was often truly clever and original and doesn’t take itself too seriously. It was just so fun.
The real mystery of the story isn’t the question of The Event — what’s really going on with Pat’s family is pretty obvious pretty quickly. Instead, the main question is that of who you, the player character, are, and why you’re getting so involved in Pat’s life. This can only be solved by playing through until you manage to meet and defeat all the family members, and there are three endings which gradually escalate as you get closer to the truth. The game carries over all of your progress between playthroughs, so despite the ostensible time limit you basically can take as long as you want and not miss anything. I thought it was really well-constructed and was able to complete everything in 5 hours, including some of the more punishing achievements.
The gameplay is simple warioware-style minigames. This isn’t usually my favorite thing, but with a game that had so much going on in terms of art, music, and writing, I think this worked really well. (I actually quite liked the pinball minigame lol.) The minigames are cute and thematic and add some fun stakes without feeling like they’re getting in your way, and I think that’s fine for this type of game.
My one complaint is the achievements, which are really incongruously punishing for the style of game this is — it looks like someone separate from the main dev was responsible for the programming/tech side of things and whoever they were made a bad choice here. But that’s a real nitpick. I didn’t have any problems findings the collectibles, though an indicator of whether you’d found everything in a given area would have been nice.
On the whole I thought it was great and honestly for me the visuals and music make it worth experiencing on their own. I’ve been chuckling about it for a while now and will continue to think back fondly on it for the foreseeable future. I’m sure it was an enormous amount of work in terms of animation but I’d love to see another game from this studio — I’d especially love to see a completely different direction and atmosphere for the style. The team is just really talented.
Night Call
(MonkeyMoon and Black Muffin, 2019)
It’s so very interesting to me that the games who don’t want to shake things up too much are willing to criticize the police as long as they’re represented by a woman. Such a strange and revealing confluence of institution and other.
I was surprised at how misogynistic this game was, which sounds stupid at this point and maybe kind of is, but this one seemed like it was also trying to critique anti-Arab sentiment in Europe, and “Arab people are actually humans but women aren’t” is such a weird mess of a stance. Though I also think I overlooked how noir-coded this one was going on, so maybe it’s back on me there.
The premise here is interesting — you’re a cabbie trying to piece together a murder by getting locals to confide in you. I like this idea a lot; there’s a lot of jobs — cabbie, bartender, phone sex worker — that exist in a kind of liminal space which encourages confession, and that’s a really great observation to use as the basis for a detective story.
The first issue is that just because it’s a good premise doesn’t necessarily make a good game, and the gameplay here isn’t great. You choose passengers from a map, drive them, and have a set amount of time to do as many as possible before the day turns over. Then any info you get needs to be parsed or whatever, which also takes time, and you often can only do 1 or 2 a night, meaning you’re stuck with tons of info your character won’t look at for some reason. Then instead of letting you sort through clues yourself, the game automakes a pin-board to show how everything connects, so you don’t actually have to do any deduction yourself. The upshot is there’s just not a ton of player input, and what’s there isn’t very interesting.
The game has two or three ‘plots’ but then makes the weird choice to have a mode where the culprit seems to be assigned randomly to one of the potential passengers and… that’s not even a story at that point, you’re just playing an elaborate game of Guess Who. I’m not sure why they didn’t commit to a narrative here. Or hell, even do it serial style. The gameplay here just isn’t very interesting, so it’s winning hearts that way, but also the whole point of a whodunnit is that it’s deliberately set up and structured and it’s not doing that either, so I’m not sure what the point of this is… it’s just Clue, really, except the point of Clue is it’s a board game you play with other people, so…? The structure feels so muddled, like they didn’t know what they really were trying to do so committed to nothing.
The game also makes the incredibly bizarre choice to have like, urban fantasy passengers? So on one hand its gritty noir, and on the other you pick up a sapient cat and like some kind of vampire? AND it tries to do scifi plotlines, with like robots and messages from the future? It was all super weird and I don’t know what it was supposed to make me feel. It just contributed to the muddled feeling.
The other issue is wow does this game have issues with women. It starts with the cartoonishly evil woman cop, who you can call a ‘fucking bitch’ and then if you choose not to, you do it anyway, and then you add a note to your character index that just say ‘Fucking bitch.’ Just in case it wasn’t clear. Then there’s the woman passengers, which include: an exhausted mockery of an SJW-coded woman college student for being too stupid to understand film (she even has The Lesbian Haircut); a woman who begs the cabbie to sexually harass her because street harassment is the only way she can feel desireable (there’s a bonus ‘men can’t be sexually harassed’ undercurrent to this one, where the game seems completely unaware of the fuckedupness of the power dynamic between a person in a service job and a client who insists they make sexual overtures as her; the idea this may be uncomfortable and violating for the cabbie never comes up — funny how hating women goes hand-in-hand with an equally messed up attitude toward men); then a crystal woo-woo type who navigates the cab by dowsing and says “the black liquid ceases flowing from my vagina” (so stupid how women talk about their own bodies, what idiots); and there’s this bizarre one with a woman torturing and killing a cat that I can’t even begin to unpack. Honestly I just kept going, “All of the women passengers can’t be so horrible, surely I’ve reached the end of it,” and then the next one would somehow be yet another sexist stereotype. It just kept going, lol.
Anyway, I finished one of the actual plots and it was aggressively boring so I never went on to the other. I came out of this feeling like it squandered an interesting premise, but aside from its weird hangups with women, it wasn’t terrible, just dull.
Lockheart Indigo
(Fangsoft, 2020)
The freeware continues to shine!
I found this little game unexpectedly compelling. It’s an rpgmaker attempt at a social-battle detective game. The title comes from the battle metaphor — by outwitting the suspects you can ‘unlock hearts’ and get them to tell you the truth.
I thought the plot was solid, if a bit obvious. I was mostly hooked by the two main characters, Aya and Beatris, who were unusually engaging. Both felt more complex than these types of characters usually do, especially when they’re women, and I just… liked them. The plot was extremely linear — it didn’t feel like a whodunnit or anything — and there’s not really any deduction or puzzle-solving, but I was totally into it through to the end, largely because of the characters. I was also very exhausted when I played since so I admittedly can’t rule out that I was just extra-receptive to a little indie, lol. And honestly, it’s free, so the risk is low.
I also really liked the aesthetic — I think with a lot of the ‘minimalist pixel art’ games you look at and go, “Okay, this person is blindly aping Undertale,” (or, less often nowadays, Earthbound/Dragon Quest/FF). However, the art direction here felt much more thoughtful and deliberate. The bulk of the game is in greyscale, except for pops of color, which are used thoughtfully to evoke certain characters, moods, or themes. It’s used with a gentle hand and the result, to me, was really effective.
The battles themselves varied in quality — I think it would have been better suited by having there be multiple ways to get at the person’s hangups instead of having to find the exact ones the game had in mind — I imagine it was limited by rpgmaker here. Especially toward the endgame where you had a bunch of techniques, it started to feel more random which ones worked than like I was thinking carefully about the person. As a lot of these small games do, it had a tendency to feel more like a proof-of-concept for a social battle system than a fully functioning system. I still like that kind of thing, but if you’re looking for a fully-polished and robust social battler you may be disappointed.
All in all, it doesn’t ask any big questions about the meaning of life, but it tells a solid story about solid people, and has that great feel of an early project by a promising dev. It looks like the dev has since released two more games on itch.io, one of which is a full game, Myosotis, which looks really interesting and I’ll probs check out at some point. Hope to see more from them!