Detective Penguin sent me down a detective game rabbit hole.
(The intro to this got long, but oh well.)
Inside: The Darkside Detective, A Case of Distrust, The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog, Nut City Blues, Shivah
As those who’ve known me for a while know, I love the mystery genre so much I write about it for a living, but the flipside of that is that because the bulk of bigname detective games are just adaptations or fanfic of novels (especially Agatha Christie and Holmes), they don’t really have a ton to offer me. I think Agatha Christie – The ABC Murders is a great way to bring her work to a new audience, but I don’t feel the need to play a game of a novel I read years ago and already know back and forth. Further, I don’t really feel the need to see famous detectives not written by the authors that made them famous. I don’t have a problem with adaptation — I will defend the Guy Ritchie Holmes movies to my dying day — but the detectives themselves aren’t the draw for me, the author’s ability to construct a narrative is. And without the author… who cares? I think the trend of “we got someone new to write Poirot stories and try to mimic Christie’s style” is super boring and, frankly, cynical.
I also have to admit to a little bit of elitism. I have read a metric fuckton of detective fiction, and my standards for what entertains me are pretty high just because I’ve seen so damn much of it. And frankly, I just didn’t trust games to deliver, not least because I certainly don’t trust Steam reviews to be a barometer for what constitutes a well-constructed mystery. But also I think, because… well, the form is young. If most of everything sucks, then when things are new that proportion is going to be even higher, and there’s only so many hours in a day. (And then of course there’s the whole thing where a genre whose print iteration has long had a violent misogyny and homophobia problem moving into gamer culture… it bodes poorly.)
But! Now I have a ton of time because I’m too surgeried to do anything, and honestly, Detective Penguin just reminded me how much I love this genre, as well as showing me what weird, unique stuff games as a form could do with it. So I pulled up the best-of lists, scoured SteamDB, clicked past a lot of angry violent men, watched the sales, and played a whooooole bunch of games.
Interestingly, I found the games fell into a few broad categories:
1. Whodunits but everyone is an animal, often specifically a furry. This is pretty overwhelmingly where the best games tended to fall.
2. Cyberpunk and hardboiled with cops as the protagonists, a baffling development for two subgenres that have their roots in antiestablishment and anticapitalist ideologies.
3. The culprit is Lovecraft. People really like this one for reasons I’m unclear on. It may have been the largest proportion of games.
4. QUIRKY!!!!!! Tumblr circa 2009 vibes.
5. Anime girls.
I have no idea why these are overarching subgenres, but they were. #1 and #2 were far and away the most competent, although at this stage of my life I’m really not interested in copaganda, which cast a pallor over even the more competent #2 entries (this is also where all the genre’s historical misogyny has found its home). I don’t mind supernatural mysteries as much as some people might, but the sheer amount of “a ghost did it” in a genre that’s supposed to be meaningfully solveable is deeply weird to me, and I fundamentally don’t understand the point of a detective story where the culprit is always eldritch horror. Surely that takes all the suspense away…? Like for every one of the stories, the motive is “beyond our understanding” and the culprit is “evil squid.” Why the trappings of the detective genre in that case? Idk, I don’t get it. #4 will exist as long as teenagers exist, I presume, and #5 is clearly the unfortunate consequence of the When They Cry and Danganronpa games, and the quality of games in #5 varied really wildly.
Like I said above, the furries know where it’s at for mysteries. I’m curious about the history of that — I know furry communities tend to be pretty queer-friendly, and historically lesbian culture had a huge influence on 80s and 90s detective fiction, so I wonder if those things are related. Furries also generally take art seriously, so I suppose it’s not shocking to find a genre they’ve roosted in producing good entries. I also wonder if something about the subculture lent itself to meaningful genre critique. Like, I don’t know anything about furry culture, but I do know that because they’ve been the butt of jokes so long they take bullying pretty seriously, and I could reasonably see a chain of cause and effect where you have like: subculture that is sensitive to bullying > inclusive and accepting subculture > diverse subculture > subculture that is aware of the issues faced by marginalized groups > politically aware subculture > subculture that is good at producing institutional critique.
But it’s also not only furries — there’s just a lot of anthropomorphic animals solving mysteries in general. Which is interesting to me. I think in both cases there’s also probably something inherently allegorical about animals-as-people that makes them appealing for this kind of social critique. I’ve been thinking about why this might be a lot, and one thing I keep coming back to is the possibility that like… so if you take an animal that doesn’t have a strong cultural significance in and of itself, say a wildebeest, you can then apply signifiers to it very specifically and get it to signify exactly what you want, whereas with human characters there is always already baggage that you have to account for. So like, a sprite for a woman character isn’t just signifying women’s issues, but also things like race, gender, beauty standards, etc., whereas the theoretical wildebeest doesn’t come prepackaged with those other things, so you can say “I just want this to be woman,” and then you can make choice to racialize, gender, etc. it in the exact way you want, which lets your allegory be more specific and lets you construct the story with more precision.
Obviously on some level it’s monkey-see, monkey-do (lol), but what I find fascinating is that’s it’s not just that a lot of people are doing animal allegories, but they’re consistently what’s being done the best. And I feel like that couldn’t be the case if there wasn’t something that the format was allowing people to do that was unique.
I should really just be writing my dissertation. Here are some reviews.
—–
The Darkside Detective
The Darkside Detective: A Fumble in the Dark
(Spooky Doorway, 2017 & 2021)
In some ways this is a weird review to start this post with, because Darkside Detective isn’t really a detective story, at least not in the traditional whodunit sense — you’re not going to be puzzling out a mystery or trying to suss out a culprit. It’s a traditional point-and-click with some light puzzles that uses the genre beats as set dressing. But even going in expecting a more typical detection experience… I loved these games. What clearly started out as a silly pastiche of the supernatural detective genre ended up become this weird, unique character-driven serial about a couple of weird dudes in a weird world and their relationships with each other and the people around them, with the supernatural-detective theme serving as a jumping-off point for exploring this outlandish place and its people.
Both games are made up of nine “cases,” self-contained but intra-referential stories. What I ended up really liking about this format was watching the writers slowly find their footing. It’s clear toward the beginning that the original idea was for a pretty by-the-numbers “masquerade” setting where Det McQueen is the supernatural PI who nobody really believes, but pretty quickly it veers off in another, more interesting direction — by case three or four, the setting becomes one in which the city of Twin Lakes is just so weird people have stopped even noticing how paranormal it is, and McQueen is desperately trying to stop people from getting themselves and others killed summoning demons. Further, you could see from case to case where the writers went, “Wait, that throwaway detail was interesting, let’s explore that,” or “Actually that side character was pretty funny, what would the rest of their life be like?” and lucky for me, they found the exact threads to pull on that there also the ones I found interesting. And as the writers start asking questions like, “What would this person’s home life be like?” “Who would this character date?” “What would living there be like?”, the series steadily develops into something oddly character-driven. It works so well that the 18th case, the last one of the second game, is a series of short day-in-the-life vingettes just focusing on side characters, and it’s great, because the world and people are well-developed enough that all these random people can carry their own stories. It reminded me a lot of how deep the Bob’s Burgers cast roster is.
And I love them. I love Raxa, who is awesome, and her ghost boyfriend, I love Emily and her insane thieving family, and I love that Chief Ghouley is an old English bobby and McScream is stuck in existential despair, I love how much McQueen cares about dinosaurs and putting things in his pockets and his job, and I love how much McQueen and Dooley care about each other and the letter in the locker omg <3333. I also really love that they decided to flesh McKing out more, like the idea of the gorgeous jock who’s also an AV nerd is wonderful and delightful and one day Marv will get the perfect shot and damn that thieving squirrel and
I just got really attached to the world and its people and was sad when it was over. Which is wonderful.
On the gameplay front, these are really well-designed point-and-clicks. The first one I finished without a guide and found the gameplay pretty satisfying. I do think they ran into a problem with the second game, in that they had the resources to take up more time telling bigger stories, but struggled a bit to stretch the gameplay out — there were a couple of parts in A Fumble in the Dark where I was really stumped on what to do next, and it turned out I’d just missed some small interactable. There were also things like, I saw the interactable and the clue, but by the time I got to the place where I needed it I’d totally forgotten about it. The logic was all still there, which I very much appreciate, but the format struggled a bit as a stories got longer. On the other hand, the longer stories worked so well from a writing perspective that to me it was a worthwhile tradeoff, but obviously ideally you’d have both firing on all cylinders. A notepad or journal screen where McQueen made note of important objects you had to eventually go back to might have helped.
But honestly on the whole it was just fun, and I’m excited to see the dev develop a new IP, but I’m also hoping to return to the lovely people in Twin Lakes.
A Case of Distrust
(An Open Ben, 2018)
A Case of Distrust is an adequate but not super interesting plot bogged down by clunky gameplay and a frustrating ending. In its favor it has lovely shadowbox-style visuals and competent writing. I don’t really recommend it unless you’re just chomping at the bit for more of this type of text-based investigative game to play.
I think what the game does best are issues — it incorporates its 1920s San-Fran setting into larger thematic questions about how much things have changed and how far they have to go in a really nice way, giving bits of history and setdressing in a way that’s both naturalistic and interesting. So many of these games are unable or unwilling to engage with the larger questions the genre has been asking for decades and decades, but this game clearly understands what it’s doing and why.
The biggest problem with it is the UI. It’s just way too time-consuming and clunky the keep traversing through screens and menus to bring one new piece of information to each characters. So much of my time was spent scrolling through the extremely long list of notes and navigating through the same few options over and over. I think the notebook system would have been more bearable if the locations were, say, tabs on the side of the screen you could instatravel to — although even within that framework, I ended up stuck at the end because even though I knew what I had to do, I struggled to figure out what of the dozens of pieces of evidence I needed to show to who to unlock the entry that would let me accuse the suspect. I also think the gameplay was let down by the “contradict” prompt, which essentially acted as a spoiler by highlighting when suspects were lying and flagging which evidence I needed to pursue, which I did not enjoy.
Relatedly, I really hated the way the ending unfolded.
This game really should have just been a visual novel, maybe with some lite ability to question people. It would have been better without the gameplay. And it is kind of unfortunate, because it was competent, and I would have liked to see the dev try a sequel. The bones of the story here were good. Which I guess makes the problem the… joints? Idk.
The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog
(SEGA, 2023)
No wait, don’t scroll past!
The basic premise here is that Amy hosts a murder mystery birthday party for herself on a train, and you, a waiter, end up tagging along with Detective Tails as he pieces together the mystery.
I saw this initially and was incredibly skeptical of its insanely good Steam reviews. But when I realized it was free I thought, well, if it’s terrible, it’ll be terrible in a funny way, right? I had no expectations going in. My image of Sonic is spoiled by fandom experience.
Considering this was apparently released on April Fools 2023, this had no right to be as enjoyable as it was. This game is freeware, and I would pay money for this experience, legitimately. The art is lovely, with a pen-and-ink look and subdued colors, which is nice since Sonic art can range from fugly to over-the-top, and the sound design was great. Interspersing the VN gameplay with little arcade-style Sonic runner levels was really fun. And the writing was self-aware and clever enough to carry its own absurdity. It had me genuinely feeling things for the conductor at the end! It was just obviously a labor of love by the production team and it really shows. I finished it in about two hours and it honestly flew by. I wouldn’t call it a good *mystery*, but it was a good *experience*.
Because I am old, I had no idea who several of the characters were, but they were integrated well enough I didn’t feel left behind, and there were cute references to things even my Dreamcast-ass self could feel nostalgic about. It was just good clean fun and totally worth spending some time with if you are in the mood for something lighthearted and have a passing familiarity with Sonic. It’d be a great pick for small kids getting into Ace Attorney-style games as well.
My apologies to Sonic and Sonic-based people for doubting you.
Nut City Blues
(looking4stupid, 2023)
Another freeware game that I would have been happy paying a couple bucks for. Nut City Blues is a short (~1 hr for all endings) game about Captain Fox and his intern Detective Raccoon. It starts out by feeling too QUIRKY!!1 but manages to balance it out quickly with a surprisingly engaging plot, and in the end I really did like both Fox and Raccoon.
I liked how different Fox could be as a character based on your choices, and I also liked the way the other characters responding to him changes. Not to analyze this tiny, silly game too closely, but
The obvious problem this modus operandi runs into, of course, is that of the “we just have to remove a few corrupt people and then this setup will be fine” thing. It’s a bottom-up solution to an institutional issue that requires top-down intervention; it serves as reassurance that we don’t actually need revolutionary change. That said, I think it’s a step in the right direction from the genre’s origins, which were phenomenally doomeristic — the message of the Chandlers and Hammetts was very much “things are so fucked up it’s not even worth trying to change things”, and with that context I think trying to bring a perspective that supports change into the genre is a net positive. I’d love to see the next step be taking it even further.
What was I talking about? Oh, right, I’d gone on a completely normal digression about a game in which a raccoon obsessed with meme pizzas solves a pineapple conspiracy. Yeah, totally worth checking out if you’ve got an hour to kill and $0 burning a hole in your pocket.
The Shivah
(Wadjet Eye Games, 2006)
Shivah was the first of these games I played that felt like an actual artistic experience. Unlike most of the entries that fall into that #2 category above, this feels like real noir, a meaningful examination of social forces and the outsider’s place in them. The caveat there is that it originally came out in 2006, and it plays like a point-and-click that came out in 2006. There’s no moon logic — the answers are always there somewhere — but they can be incredibly opaque, with little direction, and while I think this game is worth experiencing, a guide or Let’s Play might be a good choice. Though admittedly figuring things out did make me feel like a genius.
I was initially trepedatious of Shivah, as a game from 2006 with Jewish main characters, but this is actually fundmentally about the characters and culture, making it one of very few pieces of any media to meaningfully center and consider a Jewish protagonist. In fact the protagonist is a Rabbi, Rabbi Stone, whose poverty-stricken synagogue is about to be foreclosed on, sped up by Stone’s own increasing cynicism driving away the last members of his congregation. One day, a police inspector shows up at the synagogue to accuse Stone of being involved in the murder of a congregation member he had a falling out with 8 years prior.
Stone is a complex protagonist, bitter and dogmatic, but also still with some sparks of belief in doing what’s right — his cynicism hasn’t penetrated so far that he’s stopped caring; indeed, it seems to be the opposite — that he can’t understand why others don’t share his commitment to what they profess to believe, and it’s that that makes him to most resentful. His desire to help, to make amends, seems genuine, which makes it possible to root for him — you may not agree with his moral code, but you can respect that he sticks to it, that he means it (something that, not insignificantly, can also be said of detectives like Marlowe). I also liked that while the game admits the events of the plot don’t change his material circumstances very much, it did give him something, emotionally, that changes his ability to face it.
I don’t want to say too much more because of all the games in this post, this is absolutely the one most worth experiencing. It took me about 1hr 40mn to clear, including the part where I got sick of trying to figure out the last fight and looked up a guide. (Incidentally, despite being insanely opaque, the mechanic in the last confrontation was actually quite clever.) It also routinely discounts to a dollar, which is very much worth it. This developer has continued to release point-and-click mysteries over the years and I’m looking forward to seeing how they developed over time. This is a pretty incredible debut.