The police quest series come to mind. I remember loving those as a kid.
The graphics make me feel very nostalgic.
Woooooah! This is spectacular. Thanks for pointing to it!
The Infocom games are a great suggestion, can’t believe I forgot about them. My last try at Deadline was maybe 15 years ago, and I bounced off hard. I just couldn’t get any kind of grip at all on the case, nothing I tried seemed to give anything useful or open up new avenues of investigation. But it’s totally worth another shot now, it was always easily their most interesting game concept.
I understand that the puzzle design in Deadline is bordering on the unfair, and you need to do be in the right locations at the right time to see characters do something to get crucial bits of information. So it is not just a matter of mapping the locations, you also need to basically map the timeline of what the characters are going to do, via repeat playthroughs. But I am actually fine with that! Detective stories with a good complicated timeline are the best ones (hm, it might be time to reread The Five Red Herrings). It is just a little bit different here since you are constructing one for the future rather than reconstructing one for the past.
Yeah I don’t remember much about Deadline (tried it in the 80s) but I remember it was crazy hard.
Caveat, I haven’t played the below games myself, only heard people talk about them on podcasts.
That said, Graham Smith (of The Crate and Crowbar and Rock, Paper, Shotgun, formerly of PC Gamer UK) also seems to have a thing for Detective games. From the top of my head, I remember him positively talking about Where’s an Egg?, Make it Good and Black Closet.
What about Eve: Burst Error?
Kenno Hiroyuki created a lot of Detective Visual Novel games in Japan before he passed away. His Gentleman Detective series(1,2,3) were also promising but he wasn’t able to complete it.
Eve’s notable in that I believe it’s the only game that he worked on that’s actually available in English (albeit an older version)
Someone needs to dig in Activision’s archives and remake _Murder on the Mississippi. _
Deadline is infuriating. I had time to kill on a three hour flight, and actually made a huge amount of progress. Finding motives for 3 people, and proving to my own satisfaction the method that was used for the entry and for the actual murder.
But after that I went on two completely unproductive snipe hunts, one for a apparently teleporting object (whose special nature was even highlighted by Duffy), the other for what looked like an action whose result changed based on the order of events but actually is just random (you can repeat the action 3 times to get the right result). And it took hours to properly manipulate the game state such that I was convinced these weren’t as important things as they appeared.
So I gave up and search for what to do with what I thought was my most critical piece of evidence that I thought I’d done everything possible with. And of course the way to progress the story was to use an absurd command variation on it. (In all fairness, the variant was listed in the manual).
That opened up the game again, and it appears much easier to bully people into reacting. But even when they do that, I can’t actually get anything useful out of it. I could get two people to contradict each other about a very important thing, but there appears to be no way to confront either about it.
I can see someone doing an incredibly incriminating thing, but since they move out of the room before I can do anything, I can’t actually ask them about it. (The object isn’t in the room we are in). I jump through a lot of hoops to intercept the character at the location where I know they’ll dispose of the evidence. And if I try to do anything (e.g. search them, ask about the item), they’ll just shrug, dispose of the evidence right in front of me, and there appears to be nothing I can do about it.
I can drive the case to a state where a character commits an extremely dodgy suicide; I can’t ask anyone about it since they assume I’m talking about the original suicide.
At this point I’m almost certain I know how it all went down. Or if I’m wrong, there must be a really good additional layer of misdirection I haven’t penetrated yet. Either way, It’s a great whodunit scenario. I love how the people walk around conducting their own business but you can perturb them our of their orbit.
And there is something interesting about how you can’t just stumble onto important evidence, but need to pick up the right hints and really work at following the thread. (Another example; there was one set of objects I was suspicious about in a certain way. Just examining it did nothing. But I thought about the thing I really wanted to know about it based on my earlier evidence, rephrased the command in a more specific way, and boom got additional confirmation for the theory).
It’s just that when it comes to people rather than things, coercing the game to do the right action is more trouble than it’s worth. Not sure yet whether I’ll switch directly to a walkthrough, or try to search for information on individual blocking puzzles much more aggressively (so basically beat my head against an individual puzzle / character behavior for at most 10 minutes).
I wonder what a modern remake would look like.
Edit: Ok, turns out the criteria for arrest are rather looser than expected, and you’re not really expected (and can’t) follow the important threads to their conclusion. It’s enough to have the right bits of circumstancial evidence around, it’s assumed that the player has noticed these things and interpreted them correctly. I’m maybe a bit unhappy about. But anyway after one more nudge about the proper timing of a certain thing I got what seems like the “best” ending after some less satisfying ones.
I would definitely listen to Ginger_Yellow and add Blade Runner to your list. Part of it is a more traditional graphic adventure, but it’s actually a tiny part. It’s a fantastic game where your deductions really matter.
Hard to find nowadays, though.
Yeah, another vote for Blade Runner. You could tell the developers were really passionate about building the world as accurately as possible. There is a retrospective here that is worth a watch and has an interview with Louis Castle, the co-founder of Westwood who worked on the game. I had no idea you could purposefully fudge the calibration on the Voight-Kampff machine in order to save/kill replicants or humans.
Why does the old Mission Critical game come to mind here? I have fond but blurry memories of that one.
It has that reputation for sure. One of the most punishing of all the Infocom games, if not the most. So much so that (IIRC) Infocom deliberately toned things down in their subsequent games. (Not really to their credit, IMO.) The only way to have a good experience playing it and a decent chance of solving it is to keep meticulous notes on events, when they take place, where they take place and who’s involved. One of the downsides to this type of game design, IMO, is that unless you happen to be the inspiration for Benedict Cumberbatch’s interpretation of Sherlock Holmes, you will absolutely have to rely on saving and reloading frequently (for my tastes) while you gather information.
I just picked up An Act of Murder by Christopher Huang and began fooling around with it. So far, it’s very reminiscent and works for me. Also features Duffy, but it’s not nearly as difficult as Deadline.
That mapping system for text adventures looks pretty cool. What would be a good game to use that with? A Mind Forever Voyaging is what came to my…mind, but does that hold up or are there better choices? I’d preferably want something with sensible puzzles.
It would almost be cheating in games that have mazes, like the Zorks. But I’d still do it.
Haven’t tried it with AMFV myself, but I suspect automapping might be of great utility in nearly any interactive fiction game. I think you’ll find the most value using it with games that have complicated spacial relationships but yes, AMFV might be a great use case given some of the weird things it does. Of course, the game itself also has automapping.
Note: Unbeknownst to me when I posted about Trizbort above, it also has the ability to record and show objects in the room, or any similar details you care to show. It’s manually done, but works nicely. Also: in my Enchanter series games I have a custom object on the map that is not an actual location called My Spell Book, which simply lists all spells I currently have recorded in the spell book. It’s not dynamic, unfortunately, but super useful just the same and I imagine in the Zork series, you could do something similar with the contents of the trophy case and in detective games, you could create objects for “events”, “clues”, etc.
I haven’t tried this yet, but Contradiction looks pretty interesting. There’s a brief gameplay video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVJUoVWQQrc. It’s very British.
Eagle Eye mysteries was a great game when I was younger. You play these teenage detectives who solve mysteries around town by interviewing people and finding clues.
I like this thread.
What are the best detective games that run on the iPad? These would be great games for long plane rides.
The game that I would create if I had mad programming skills/money/owned a publisher: 40s LA. The city and world of Phillip Marlowe, drenched in the Film Noir environment. Gangsters running casinos behind secret doors, a police force with good cops and corrupt cops, friends who are a bit shady, dames who are heart of gold but play both sides, rich and poor, and on and on.
Each new game is generated fresh. Someone hires you (Marlowe) and the world is set up. Everyone has their motives, and you have to explore this world to solve the case. Everyone is consistent in their behavior, but last time your contact who runs the rough neighborhood bar was a good source of what he’d hear there, this time he is in debt to the mob guy who runs the backroom casino (though you don’t know that at first, you have to figure it out by what you hear from others, or perhaps you find a way to get him to admit it to you) and so his info is not straight. And on and on and on. The city has a 40s film noir personality.
Anyone remember Murder on the Zinderneuf? An old EA game when EA games came in what looked like record jackets. You were a detective on a zeppelin making a trip like a cruise ship, you have the time before it docked to solve a murder, same character every time but different murderer and back stories (this time the sister of the rich woman was having an affair with the husband of the couple on their honeymoon, etc.) Simple but a lot of fun.
You’re basically describing Blade Runner, except for the year.
Contradiction is available on iOS. As are Last Express, some of the Phoenix Wright games, and some point and clicks that could loosely be called detective games (eg Beneath A Steel Sky, the Broken Sword games, Wadjet Eye’s games).
As for Contradiction, Giant Bomb did an epic Let’s Play of it a while back. To be honest, that’s probably the best way to experience it. The gameplay isn’t particularly gripping.