This review contains spoilers
In a game of constant revelations and unexpected twists, maybe my favorite was the growing understanding that you aren’t really a detective, unraveling the mystery and bringing the guilty party to justice, but more just an observer, simply charting the flow of history and watching the chaos unfold. Especially as you get deeper and deeper in the game, the conspiracy’s generational scope and ever-expanding reach seems like it’s only been afforded by this unique position, but I do wonder if it’s an approach that explains some of the game’s weaknesses.
You’re meant to fill in a mad-libs style description of events with the names and phrases you find in the environment, and you get a notification if you're down to missing two clues or fewer, so once you know the basic shape of the mystery and feel out the one phrase that you’re missing, it’s easy to spend much of the game feeding data into the machine until it spits out the correct result, and not earnestly working on understanding the "who" and "why" of the case.
Less of a problem as the game goes on and each scenario gets has so many moving parts that it’s faster just to try and make sense out of everything, but it seems like the behavior that would be harder to get away with if you were a key figure in the story (Like, I doubt in most other mystery games you would let accuse everyone- and then every combination of names in the word pool- without reminding you of how graceless of a solution that is.)
On the other hand, this voyeuristic quality helps embrace another side of player behavior; as you progress through the game you end up building on so much of your prior knowledge that it’s often valuable to jump back to some older scenario and refresh yourself who’s related to who and the other bits of connective tissue in the world. Certainly wouldn't be disastrous if this was a non-diegetic action, but it comes far more naturally to a game that frames everything as part of the timeline of events- flipping back and forth between key points until you finally understand the connective tissue of the world.
Though even as I started to really get into the game, scribbling theories and notes about each of the cases, I also couldn’t help but think a lot about the one-off nature of these detective games as well. Know it was on the mind of because of a talk mentioned by CarbonCanine is his review of Tunic on his GOTY 2022 list, where designer Eriz Zimmerman questioned the legitimacy of the mysteries provided puzzle-box games, in comparison to the continual sense of systemic discovery provided by games such as Chess or Tennis.
While his framing of the point is kind of harsh, I generally agree with what he's saying, and it also seems like one of other limitations of this sort of puzzle-box design is that you also get very fragile mysteries- have a solution or the story spoiled for you, and it's likely you’d lose a tremendous reason to play through them. I know it was the reason I was so reluctant to look up hints and one of the reasons I’ve been so wary to discuss the plot in greater detail. I’m not even sure whether or not knowing that you’re going to really fully experience the game once is good or bad, certainly felt like it prompted a greater degree of engagement with it than if I knew I was going to revisit it again and again, but I also wonder about the enduring qualities of such games- which seem to fall by the wayside once everything is solved and filed away.
Hope that one day we get some mystery titles where those mechanical truths aren’t just limited to that first playthrough.
—
Extra thoughts:
- Great example of “perfect information” as well, similar to something like Into the Breach. Most scenarios only consist of a few screens, and the default setting highlights every interactable object in the environment, so you don’t have to engage in pixel-hunting or worry that you're stuck on some puzzle you don’t even have a full understanding of.
- Loses points for framing "overthrowing the monarchy” as villainous.
—
References:
CarbonCanine, The Thirty-Five Best Games I Played in 2022, Link
"...on the one hand, it seems like you are creating this wonderful palette for players to have these wonderful experiences of discovery and mystery...on the other hand, I also kept on thinking that it's almost like we're sort of coddling the player...You're designing this sort of baby crib for the player...like a special place for them to be able to crawl around and have these artificial experiences of discovery and mystery...and I was thinking about Meg Jayanth (who's a game writer), and she was writing and speaking about her experience with 80 Days and talking about this notion of 'player entitlement'; that as game designers often we are there to service the players and bring them pleasure, and as an alternative we have to kind of challenge them, to not put them at the center of the universe...and I don't know what the answer is, and one wonders what the alternative can be, but I think about what 'mystery and discovery' is if one is getting really deep into Tennis or Chess, like uncovering a system as you are in conversation with another player...or uncovering the way that other people are expressing themselves through the game, which is different than...finding the little trails of breadcrumbs that you've laid out for them."
You’re meant to fill in a mad-libs style description of events with the names and phrases you find in the environment, and you get a notification if you're down to missing two clues or fewer, so once you know the basic shape of the mystery and feel out the one phrase that you’re missing, it’s easy to spend much of the game feeding data into the machine until it spits out the correct result, and not earnestly working on understanding the "who" and "why" of the case.
Less of a problem as the game goes on and each scenario gets has so many moving parts that it’s faster just to try and make sense out of everything, but it seems like the behavior that would be harder to get away with if you were a key figure in the story (Like, I doubt in most other mystery games you would let accuse everyone- and then every combination of names in the word pool- without reminding you of how graceless of a solution that is.)
On the other hand, this voyeuristic quality helps embrace another side of player behavior; as you progress through the game you end up building on so much of your prior knowledge that it’s often valuable to jump back to some older scenario and refresh yourself who’s related to who and the other bits of connective tissue in the world. Certainly wouldn't be disastrous if this was a non-diegetic action, but it comes far more naturally to a game that frames everything as part of the timeline of events- flipping back and forth between key points until you finally understand the connective tissue of the world.
Though even as I started to really get into the game, scribbling theories and notes about each of the cases, I also couldn’t help but think a lot about the one-off nature of these detective games as well. Know it was on the mind of because of a talk mentioned by CarbonCanine is his review of Tunic on his GOTY 2022 list, where designer Eriz Zimmerman questioned the legitimacy of the mysteries provided puzzle-box games, in comparison to the continual sense of systemic discovery provided by games such as Chess or Tennis.
While his framing of the point is kind of harsh, I generally agree with what he's saying, and it also seems like one of other limitations of this sort of puzzle-box design is that you also get very fragile mysteries- have a solution or the story spoiled for you, and it's likely you’d lose a tremendous reason to play through them. I know it was the reason I was so reluctant to look up hints and one of the reasons I’ve been so wary to discuss the plot in greater detail. I’m not even sure whether or not knowing that you’re going to really fully experience the game once is good or bad, certainly felt like it prompted a greater degree of engagement with it than if I knew I was going to revisit it again and again, but I also wonder about the enduring qualities of such games- which seem to fall by the wayside once everything is solved and filed away.
Hope that one day we get some mystery titles where those mechanical truths aren’t just limited to that first playthrough.
—
Extra thoughts:
- Great example of “perfect information” as well, similar to something like Into the Breach. Most scenarios only consist of a few screens, and the default setting highlights every interactable object in the environment, so you don’t have to engage in pixel-hunting or worry that you're stuck on some puzzle you don’t even have a full understanding of.
- Loses points for framing "overthrowing the monarchy” as villainous.
—
References:
CarbonCanine, The Thirty-Five Best Games I Played in 2022, Link
"...on the one hand, it seems like you are creating this wonderful palette for players to have these wonderful experiences of discovery and mystery...on the other hand, I also kept on thinking that it's almost like we're sort of coddling the player...You're designing this sort of baby crib for the player...like a special place for them to be able to crawl around and have these artificial experiences of discovery and mystery...and I was thinking about Meg Jayanth (who's a game writer), and she was writing and speaking about her experience with 80 Days and talking about this notion of 'player entitlement'; that as game designers often we are there to service the players and bring them pleasure, and as an alternative we have to kind of challenge them, to not put them at the center of the universe...and I don't know what the answer is, and one wonders what the alternative can be, but I think about what 'mystery and discovery' is if one is getting really deep into Tennis or Chess, like uncovering a system as you are in conversation with another player...or uncovering the way that other people are expressing themselves through the game, which is different than...finding the little trails of breadcrumbs that you've laid out for them."
Reviewed on Jan 14, 2023