Colonel’s Bequest has a very interesting difference to the games I’ve mentioned earlier. Instead of solving a crime after the fact, you’re in the middle of the events as the crime is happening. I love that idea; what I think of as the most iconic detective stories do not just start in medias res after the murder. They start the narration at an earlier point, allowing the reader (and usually the detective) to observe the characters in their natural habitat before everything changes. Why couldn’t a game do that as well?
The obvious answer is that you can’t have the player actually prevent the crime, or there will be nothing for them to solve later. So they can have only limited agency in the early part of the game. Colonel’s Bequest is ok with that. In fact it goes further, the player character is purely a passive observer until the final scene.
The game takes place over 8 hours of game time. Time advances only when you move to specific locations within specific time ranges, which triggers some kind of an event. This is a pretty clever way of controlling access to information while maintaining the illusion of freedom. Sure, you can camp in the room where the victim is located. But the plot will not advance until you move away, allowing things to happen without you observing them.
On the other hand, it’s a damn weak form of interaction. To finish the game, literally they only thing you need to do is to walk through the locations at random until you trigger an event (and repeat until you’ve done it ~30 times). And “random” really means “random”. While the locations / times for events are constant from game to game, they are pretty arbitrary. The first time through there is no way you could predict which locations you need to visit to advance the plot. You need an exhaustive search which takes a lot of time.
It’s particularly frustrating for two events, which happen in locations that were previously inaccessible and there is no indication that this time will be different. In one case a locked door gets magically unlocked, in another an action that previously did nothing useful suddenly advances the plot.
I think this random walk would not merely result in finishing the game, but actually give you enough information to correctly solve the mystery. Of course that’s not a very satisfying way to play. What you really want to do is find ways of covertly observing discussions between characters, form an idea of exactly who is going to be where and when to snoop on them, gather time-sensitive material evidence during particular windows of opportunity, etc. And that detective work is pretty satisfying.
The idea seems to have been that the first time around the players understand nothing about what is happening, but just learn the event triggers. And then on subsequent runs they build up more and more understanding of the case, since they can now go through the game very quickly. But for this idea to really work, you’d really want the first run to leave the player completely baffled about the case. Since that’s not the reality, I can’t imagine replying the game despite there being some content I missed. Knowing exactly which subplots are red herrings and which ones actually matter trivializes most of the game.
Finally, there are two major missed opportunities.
The first one is that the game makes a huge deal about talking to characters. There’s even custom hot keys for entering commands to show items, or ask about / tell about arbitrary things. I spent a lot of time doing that. And there is literally nothing you can do with these commands that will have any effect. If I find out that Wilbur is embezzling money from Henri, and tell Henri about it, he’ll just say “So what?” and the game carries on as before. I don’t insist on being able to change the major story beats. But at least give a story vignette, or change a subplot a little. Or make the characters behave differently, and have that open up new snooping opportunities.
The second problem is that the characters do not obey the same rules as the player. Ideally you’d be able to e.g. proclaim a character innocent if they could physically have made it from point A to point B in time to commit the crime. Not how it works; once characters are off screen, anything is possible.
(Deadline did both of these things 7 years earlier, so I don’t think these are unreasonable wishes).
I’ve been kind of hard on Colonel’s Bequest here. It’s actually totally worth playing even today. In the context of being an '80s Sierra game, it’s amazing. Sure, there’s a bit of the standard Sierra jank there. But much less than in any other of their games from that era. As a first experiment with this kind of game structure it’s also really interesting; it might just needs a few tweaks to make the player feel more like an active participant. I’m curious to see how much (if any) of this carried over to Dagger of Amon Ra.