Any chance you could summarize what made Cruise for a Corpse so bad? I don’t want to read the Adventure Gamer posts on this since they’ll obviously contain a lot of spoilers. Unless the game is obviously so bad that I’d never want to play it :-)
And talking of bad games…
Detective Grimoire is a crowd-funded sequel to some Flash-based adventure game I’d never heard of. The thing that caught my eye were screenshots showing a system where you made deductions by forming complete sentences using a multiple choice system. You select two facts which are combined with a sentence fragment, and another sentence fragment that indicates some kind of a conclusion.
The gameplay consists of:
- Moving around on a small map (about 10 locations)
- Clicking on highlighted points of interest to investigate whatever is clicked at
- Talk to characters, asking them either about other characters, about items you’ve found, or one of four pre-filled more complicated questions. All of these discussions are totally linear.
- Have a more complex discussion with a character, called a “challenge”. There’s just one of these per character. Basically at various points in the conversation you’ll need to follow up with the right multiple choice question, or fail and have to start the conversation over from scratch. The multiple choices are basically just one fact you’ve learned and two untrue things. You need to select the fact. Basically all these are doing is check whether you’ve paid attention. A very similar system is also used at the very end to prove that you’ve solved the case.
- Use the deduction system described above, but only at prescribed points, and with a prompt making it pretty clear what you’re supposed to deduce. (And often this happens far far later than the player has already figured out the thing). You use this maybe 8 times during the whole game.
- Solve some extremely simple and unoffensive minigames.
The gameplay isn’t as interesting as it looked from the screenshots, since the deduction system might as well note exist. None of the rest is spectacular either. The voice acting was good, especially for an indie game. There appears to be no possibility of failure. Clicking around totally at random would eventually solve the case. Anyone not clicking around randomly would solve it in around 1.5-2 hours (which is about the right length).
Where the game really fails is the story. The characters are totally outlandish cartoons, whose motives you can’t reason about at all. The method used for the murder is incredibly complicated for no good reason that I could find. And what the murderer does after the deed is just the stupidest thing ever. You can’t make a whodunit work when every element of the story is just total nonsense.
Out of morbid curiosity, I also played through the Flash game that was likewise titled Detective Grimoire. It’s much simpler mechanically than the commercial game, and has a totally separate and much more grounded story. The story at least makes sense, but is painfully straightforward. Other than that, the main thing the Flash game has going for it is that at it’s really short. I’m really puzzled at how it built up a dedicated enough base of fans to Kickstart a sequel.