Detective games

Games
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Watson & Holmes: From the Diaries of 221B (2015) is a board game that’s clearly inspired by Sherlock Holmes: Consulting detective, but goes in a very different direction. The big difference is that it’s a purely competitive game.

A short introduction gives you some starter clues, and a question to be answered up front (e.g. “How did the victim die”, “Who was responsible for it”, and “What was in the safe?”). After that a set of about 15 location cards is placed on the table, with the only thing that the players know about the contents being the name of the location. All players will select one to read, using what is effectively a penny auction. Everyone reads their card (anything from a few sentences to five paragraphs) and takes notes. After the round is over, you’re not allowed to refer to the location again. So you’d best make sure the notes include everything you really want to know.

Instead of visiting a clue location, you can go to 221B to answer the questions. There’s also a couple of special power that can be used to lock other people from visiting a specific location, unlock a locked one temporarily or permanently, or force someone to read their location aloud.

Later scenarios will introduce small tweaks to the game mechanics. In one you don’t get the questions up front. In another the locations are split to two sets, and moving between the sets costs some of the bidding currency. More locations will start to give special power tokens, etc. Especially this last thing I don’t like a lot; it kind of distorts the investigation. when players right away visit locations they shouldn’t care about just since there’s a special power token available there.

There’s a lovely tension during the bidding phase as you’re trying to figure out what other people know, and why they are going to the place they’re going to. Did they find out something in the previous location? Do they really expect to find out something useful in the location they are going to, or is it just a shot in the dark? Are they chasing the same theory you are or something else? If you’re low on the bidding currency, should you go to 221B even with a half baked theory just to do it unchallenged? (If two people want to solve on the same round, the player with more currency gets first dibs).

One interesting bit is how much the order in which you visit the locations matters. If you find out when visiting the body that the body was hit from the back with the left hand, you’re probably going to keep an eye out for even slight hints about whether someone is left- or right-handed. Likewise there are some locations that are going to be totally useless unless you have a very specific bit of information from elsewhere.

The writing and the design of the cases has been mostly good, with a couple of slightly unfair (but still solvable) bits. The one thing that is completely infuriating that Holmes refuses to ask the most obvious questions. Somebody will mention that once everyone else left a dinner party, four people still remained at the table. But will they tell who those four people were? No. Will Holmes ask? Hell, no. You need to find out the information the hard way. There are also some cases where a story beat is split in two locations, but it’s extremely unclear which location actually has the second half.

There are two things the players need to accept for the game to actually be enjoyable. First, people should be good sports and take notes sensibly rather than copy every single word. If people can’t do that, you might need to introduce a note taking timer. Second, the cases don’t often provide absolute certainty. You need to read through the lines, but worse yet you’ll occasionally need to make guesses just based on what appears in the text and what doesn’t. “Well, the murder weapon was a heavy object and the only heavy object I’ve seen was this bust. Guess it’s probably that”.

Watson & Holmes scales pretty well to large player counts. We played one game with 7 (all others with 4), and it worked just fine. The actual gameplay of reading + taking notes is done really well in parallel. And it also adds much more contention on the board, making that part more tactically interesting.

We’ve played 8 out of 13 cases so far, and Watson & Holmes has continued working well. A case takes about 60-70 minutes, so we can fit these in to our weekly lunch hour game session, where something like SH:CD would be impossible. (Of course it’s also a much slighter experience than SH:CD). I’ll almost certainly pick up the teased expansion if it actually comes out.

63

Sherlock Holmes: The Devil’s Daughter is an absolutely miserable sequel to Crimes and Punishments.

The deduction system is basically identical to Crimes and Punishments. So you gather facts by investigating, combine facts to form deductions, and by interpreting the deductions form a theory of the crime as a whole. It does however feel like they’re more lenient about having all the facts line up perfectly. So if you have two suspects, it’s e.g. totally ok to say that both of them were capable of committing the crime (though of course you’d use other deductions to exclude one of them). In the previous game those two deductions would have nonsensically conflicted each other. The other change is that the person observation minigame now requires you to give an interpretation on some of the observations. Though I don’t think it actually matters.

Everything else… The minigames and action sequences are longer, more numerous, more tedious, and occasionally even unskippable. Just in the first case you have a 15 minute shadowing sequence, a bootshining minigame, a tightrope balancing minigame, a chimney sweeping minigame, and a 10 minute chase sequence. I failed all of them at least once, some multiple times. Later on you get gems such as a 30 minute hallucination sequence with I think five separate subpuzzles of walking through rooms with different kinds of traps. Or another case with a 15 minute Tomb Raider puzzle of pushing boxes, pulling levers, raising and lowering water levels, and so on. An unskippable QTE fight sequence so obtuse that I had to try it over 10 times.

Frogwares wanted to make an action game, and unfortunately chose to do it by retrofitting the action into an existing game series where it does not fit at all. But it seems pretty clear that something else had to be cut to provide space for this. In this case it’s actual story content; there’s just four actual cases + a short epilogue with no actual detective work. And these are not good cases. One is totally trivial, two don’t make any sense, and one is ok with a very neat accident reconstruction scenario. (A friend had recommended that last case. Getting to it was the only reason I persevered through this whole game).

There’s an overarching story that’s awful to start with, but is made worse by having the characters make no sense at all. Holmes has suddenly acquired a daughter from somewhere, and the interactions with her are just cringeworthy. In another case he is for some reason hosting an actor at his apartment, and is endlessly patient with said actors interference with an investigation. Watson has turned into some kind of a fop but it’s fine since he’s mostly absent anyway.

Avoid.

64

They put stuff like that in previous Sherlock Holmes games as well. The Awakened being the one I played, and the stealth sequence in it being the point where I stopped playing it.

65

Yeah, but it’s way worse in Devil’s Daughter than before.

66

Ah, finally something other than yet another Holmes game. Agatha Christie - The ABC Murders is a point and click adventure available seemingly on every platform. Poirot is my favorite fiction detective, so I was really looking forward to this despite it not having great buzz.

The core gameplay moving around in small environments and pixel hunting for objects to interact with. The hitboxes for objects aren’t great (probably due to the game targeting touch screens first), often I’d think I was clicking on say a drawer, but actually the click registered on the door causing Poirot to just walk out of the room. The game will never let you progress unless you’ve interacted with everything in a given area of 2-3 rooms. So at least there’s never too large an area to hunt for more objects in.

There’s three basic forms of interaction. You can talk to people, using a multiple choice dialogue system. Doing the interrogation badly will nominally cause you to miss out on some clues, but the same information will be spoon-fed to you via other means later, so there’s not much to it. You can examine objects which will give you new clues to work with in the deduction part of the game, or pick them up to use in stupid adventure game puzzles. Or you can trigger one of said adventure game puzzles.

Occasionally the game will prompt you to use the already gathered clues to make a deduction. It will ask a question such as “could so and so have commited the murders”, give you a palette of about 10 clues you’ve found, and you need to choose a combination of clues that provide an answer to the question. Maybe you’d choose the clues that prove “so and so” had an alibi, and was not strong enough to commit that murder. These deductions are then usable as clues for answering later questions. This system is clearly inspired by the Frogwares games, and I think actually has more potential due to what feels like a vastly larger number of clues. But it ends up being unsatisfying for a couple of reasons.

First, you can’t answer questions the game hasn’t already posed. About 2 hours into the game I believed I’d made a very important observation. I would have loved to be able to combine the clues I already had, and express to the game that I understood what was happening. But there was no way to do it. 3 hours into the game I got more confirmation for that theory, but again could just silently fume at how slow Poirot was at putting things together. And it was only at something like the 4 hour mark that a) the game made the question available, b) made the solution completely trivial by having me choose 3 clues from a palette of 6. And second, you can’t make false deductions. You’ll never need to backtrack. These issues mean there is no sense of accomplishment at all. The deduction part is totally on rails.

The adventure game puzzles are just miserable. Let me give an example. One of the victims is a young middle class woman. In her room is a table clock. The side panel of the clock can be opened up by unscrewing two of the clock’s legs. This gives you a key, and allows you to open up some other panels on top of the clock. These panels reveal some cogs. You use the key to rotate the cogs in the correct order which opens up a second secret compartment on the clock. The contents of this compartment direct you to another room. There you open up the gramophone cabinet with another key you’ve just found. Inside the cabinet you find a gramophone disc, and a mysterious paper. This paper provides the information you need to solve a symbol substitution combination lock on the other side of the gramophone table which opens up a secret compartment on the cabinet. This secret compartment contains the handle for winding up the gramophone, and another combination lock. Opening this combination lock (with a code that’s hidden in the environment no more subtly) opens up yet another sliding panel on the cabinet. Under this panel you have a button that can be used to raise the gramophone needle, which then allows you to insert the disc and listen to a 10 second audiolog.

This makes no sense in the fiction or in real life. Who would have built this monstrosity of a gramophone cabinet, and why? How can this supposedly music loving family put up with jumping through these hoops to listen to a record? How does solving something like this fit the character of Poirot? It’s almost antithetical. And let me be clear. This is not the most ridiculous such sequence in the game.

These puzzles are the only obvious padding in the game, but the overall pace of it is just so plodding even excluding them. Poirot will waddle through the scenes painfully slowly (even if you double click to speed him up). Click on an object you’ve already looked at (since due to the hitboxes you can never be sure whether it’s something you’ve seen already), and you’ll have to listen to Poirot describe the item again. Every single transition between anything is this multi-second fade to black. Answer a deduction question correctly, and various kinds of status updates will fade in and out in a nauseating strobe effect for a while while you can’t interact with the game at all, until the game forcibly transitions you back to the deduction interface for another question. Everything feels like it’s taking fooorever. This really wants to be a 2 hour game, not a 7 hour one.

On production side, the game looks amazing. The characters have a beautiful rotoscoped look, though I can’t believe they would have actually done that and it must be just really good shaders. And the environments seem to really nail an Art Deco aesthetic. The voicework ranges between bad and unoffensive, except for the Poirot which is done by someone who does a very good David Suchet impersonation. And really, who cares about the other characters :-P

While reading up on this, I found out there was apparently a 2009 Nintendo DS game based on the same book. Except there the game had an alternate “random murderer” mode, which would switch up the solution and the clues. Which sounds totally outrageous, given the setup. This is a long shot, but did anyone happen to play that one?

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For what it’s worth jsnell, good work on the write-ups. I may never play a lot of these games but I do enjoy reading about them.

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Thanks! And thanks to everyone who has made game suggestions. My shiny used copy of Blade Runner is in the mail :)

This bit from a postmortem is just too amazing not to quote:

Contributions from Syd Mead added to a wealth of concepts for LA 2019. (When asked for materials for this feature, Mead’s agents insisted his file on the game was slim, his work on it short.) But despite “executing it faithfully,” the team soon realised that something wasn’t right. The onscreen Blade Runner, after all, is quite some departure from Mead’s perfectly conceived drawings. The new version was faithful, all right, but to the wrong source material.

“So, I went and found the guy in charge of doing the sets for the film – not the designer but the engineer,” says Castle. “We hired him as a consultant and said: ‘Look, here are the concept drawings of the set for, let’s say Deckard’s office or home, and here’s what’s in the film. How did you get from there to there?’

“He said: ‘Well, we looked at Syd Mead’s stuff and said we’d love to do it, but we don’t have a million dollars to build each set.

So we just went to the scrapyard, these props rooms, and grabbed anything similar and just bolted it on, spraypainted it and whatever we had to do to get it as close as we could.’ With that revelation, I went back to our 3D artists and said: ‘Look, you have access to these 3D libraries with all this stuff you can use, and you’re no longer permitted to make anything from scratch. You can only cull things and modify them; you can cut it, repaint it and scale it, but you can’t rebuild.’ Using that same discipline, we got a look in the game that felt very, very close.”

69

This description makes it clear this game is derived from the long line of puzzle/exploration games like Myst, The Room, and the recent Eyes of Ara. Your complaint seems that the realism and mystery solving promised by the title and IP is not borne out in the gameplay? It really sounds like just a simple explore and click puzzle game.

I see Contradiction has been mentioned here. It doesn’t have much for complex game mechanics, but it does have some actual detecting in that you need to read peoples body language, determine who is lying, and find contradictions in their statements to confront them with.

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Ooooh, let us know what you think!

i don’t know if I said this before, but I still have my original copy of the game. At the time I bought it my English was good, but I still had issue watching full movies without subtitles, specially if people had accents (I must have been in my teens), so when the game came in English, without subtitles, I had to mail it to the distributor, who then proceeded to send me a new set of disks with the Spanish version (they had a sticker saying to do this on the box, which is a weird thing to do, very expensive, why not wait until the local language disks where ready?).

Anyway, not my disks are from the Spanish dub (which is not very good) and that makes me not really want to replay it anymore :P. If only my teen self had known how hard would it be to find now!

And yes, that quote is incredible!

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Not quite. If it had been just an adventure game in that mold, I wouldn’t even have bought it.

The core of a good mystery solving system is in place in ABC Murders. It’s just integrated into the game in a way that ensures that you never need to or get to make a non-trivial deduction. Everything is spoon-fed to the player at exactly the right time, and progress through the game is guaranteed to be completely linear. So my main complaint is that they dangled this potentially neat system in front of me, and then didn’t do anything with it.

The adventure game puzzles are a secondary issue. They are pure padding, just like the Frogwares minigames. The puzzles in ABC Murders more offensive due to the complete thematic disconnect, but I could forgive that if the rest of the game was more interesting.

I loved watching other people play Contradiction, specifically the Giant Bomb video that Ginger_Yellow also mentioned. The best FMV ever :-) Just need to let enough time pass that I forget the details before I try playing it myself.

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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.

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The Last Express is available on tablets and Gog too I think.

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The guys over at The Adventure Gamer have been playing through a bunch of detective-y games lately, including the 1991 version of Consulting Detective and the -wretched- Cruise for a Corpse.

Just like their inspiration site -The CRPG Addict-, they’re burning through the games in chronological order, so you can dig into the archives for the older Sierra adventures such as Colonel’s Bequest, Police Quest, etc.

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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:

  1. Moving around on a small map (about 10 locations)
  2. Clicking on highlighted points of interest to investigate whatever is clicked at
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.

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Sure! The main problem I have with this title and other French adventures of the late 80s/early 90s is the game structure. Much like its predecessors Maupiti Island and Mortville Manor, in CfaC you’re given free reign to roam the setting as you please (in this case, a ship), collecting clues and talking to a bunch of suspects, but this turns out to be more of a curse than a blessing, as the game forces you to revisit each and every location each time a plot-advancing event moves the game clock forward and spawns new clues and items where there previously were none.

In terms of game mechanics, that means a lot of time is wasted in pixel hunts through screens you’ve already searched several times. Red herrings and false clues abound, in a way that ends up feeling suspiciously close to padding. As an adventure game, IMO it doesn’t cut it, but in the end, it all depends on your tolerance for this kind of design. I hear the payoff is not that great either, but you may find some enjoyment especially if you see these things as challenges instead of annoyances :-P

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It’s on sale this week, so I couldn’t resist. I’ve read some good things about this.

edit: demo

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I played the demo, and it was definitely weird and definitely interesting.

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I played this as well and found it surprisingly fun. It’s very much the child of the point-and-click Monkey Island games, but with the deduction aspect. I’m not going to say it was game of the year or anything, but when I finished I felt “Wow, what an enjoyable little game.”

I agree that some aspects of it were clunky, but it turns out I’m more willing to forgive that in indie games than in AAA ones.

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Deadline (2017)

This “Deadline” has nothing to do with the old Infocom text adventure discussed earlier. It’s a freshly released boardgame, set in 1938 New York. The players are a group of investigators doing the bidding of an old police commissioner. They’re given a single-paragraph description of the case, and a few location cards to start with (face down in the middle of the table).

In theory this is another game similar to SH:CD and Watson & Holmes. Visit the location cards, read the text there, and use that text to decide where to go. Like SH:CD, this is a co-operative game where everyone on their own turn decides which location to visit, but everyone gets the information. (Unlike in those games, new locations open up automatically as you visit others). At some point you decide you’re done, and are posed questions about the case. You answer them as a team, and those answers are scored.

But there’s a lot more “normal” gameplay and process to this than SH:CD and W&H. Every player has a hand of cards. To be allowed to visit a location, the players as a team need to play a certain number of symbols from their hand. (This number is on the back of the location card, so you know what goal you’re trying to reach). There’s a symbol matching mechanism that restricts exactly which cards can be played and when, so you might fail despite collectively (or even individually!) having the right cards. If a player can’t or won’t play a card, they’re out of the round. If all players are out, you fail and don’t get to read the card. Fail enough times, and locations start to be removed from the game (possibly different locations than the one you tried to visit).

There’s also negative cards in the game, which you play when you pass out of a round, and a mechanism for getting rid of those cards. Finally, every player has a special ability, most of them seemed to be usable once per game.

None of this gameplay is engaging in any way. And worse, it’s actively harming the main joy in playing this kind of game: deciding which place will best advance the investigation based on what you already know. Which lines of investigation look to actually be useful? Here you instead have to visit locations you’re totally sure will be useless, just because those are the only ones the team seems to have the cards for.

And what about the actual detective story? There’s 12 stories in the game. We only played the first one. It was awful.

  • The writing is bad, and there’s not enough of it.
  • The murder mystery was so simple and unambiguous that it might as well not have existed. There are three suspects. One person had an alibi. Another had told two people they did not commit the crime. The third had bought the murder weapon the day before, got their clothes modified to hide the murder weapon, and hired a friend to distract the bartender when the murder happened. Could have been any of them, I guess…
  • At times, the structure of the location cards made no sense at all. Like a location says that one of our suspects “Fat Al” did 5 years at The Tombs, and unlocks that location as an option to visit. We go there, and instead of being told anything about “Fat Al” are told about “Laura” who had been regularly visiting her boyfriend there, until he died in prison. Uh, what? Who is Laura? We came here for Fat Al.
  • When it comes time to the final questions, they were phrased in such a way that they give away the identity of the murderer. (Yes, only a total moron would not have figured out that anyway in this case. And it can sometimes be hard to not leak information about the case in the questions. But this was so blatant and unnecessary that everyone at the table was laughing for a minute.)

So we’re left with a pretty unfortunate combination. Most of the time spent playing this game is playing this unsatisfying little card game that has nothing to do with the mystery, you can’t even conduct the actual investigation the way you’d want to due to the unnecessary constraints from the card game, and the case wasn’t really worth solving anyway.

The lucky owner of the game was going to play through one of the later cases solitaire and without the card play (i.e. treating it purely as a SH:CD-lite). Maybe the later cases have at least some kind of mystery. But even if the plots get more interesting, I can’t see myself playing this a second time.

I guess this is the game @Deadline was mentioning earlier in the thread. Sorry man, nothing about this really worked for us :(

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Here is an interesting video about detective games I came across last week. It is mostly about input methods and what they do or don’t give away about the correct answer.