Ratings and Reviews by CMG

When you do a mansion murder mystery wrong, it's just another cliche. But when you do one right, you see why mansion murder mysteries are a thing in the first place. The medley of characters, the capacity for both realism and theatricality, the layered motivations, the rooms upon rooms each opening into more scenarios, expansive and yet bounded like a prison, and the wonder and horror and greed and lust and ego that naturally bubble up from the mixture.

And death. There's always death.

This game is two games in one. The first game is about the mansion itself. The second game is about the characters who inhabit it. In both games, you're initially presented with various obscure elements, but as you play along they click together to reveal totally logical underpinnings.

The mansion is mechanized. Its doors open and close, its floors raise and lower, and its tower bridge turns depending on which rooms you've entered in which order. It's not exactly a maze. You can't get lost. Rather, you have to explore your environment until you understand the principles behind its clockwork. After you've unlocked the mansion, then the second game begins.

The cast has arrived, suspended in tableaux in every room, stuck in time (which does not exist here in the usual sense). Now you aren't exploring the rooms but the characters by reading and rearranging their "intentions," which can be taken and moved like physical objects through the mansion. The intentions interact differently with different characters in different rooms. As you piece together who is really doing what to whom, and why, you're rewarded with humorous and grisly couplets describing each death that takes place. The couplets will rewrite themselves depending on how you organize everyone's motivations. It's a murder mystery in reverse, where the player doesn't solve whodunnit, but actually lays the psychological groundwork for "it" to be done.

My only disappointments with this game were that there was not a bedroom (what missed potential) and that one tower is ultimately irrelevant to both the puzzles and the story. It also would've been nice if the mansion had a plot-related purpose behind its mechanization.

It's true that the game is disjointed due to its distinctive halves, but each half is entertaining and I wouldn't sacrifice either. Although I do think the second half is where it really shines. The whole thing is a little like an interactive Edward Gorey book, which also makes "Delightful Wallpaper" about the best title I could imagine for it.

I enjoyed this game for its whimsical fairy-tale elements, but not so much for its function as an analysis of the player.

Like many online personality tests, Castle, Forest, Island, Sea suffers from the fact that life is too complicated to be boiled down into a questionnaire. This game does succeed in blending the questionnaire with the narrative so that you flow right along with the story. However, in many situations, the choices the player can select are too limiting for the game to generate an accurate analysis about the player's philosophical outlook.

For example… (Spoiler - click to show)after a man-eating three-headed giant has been defeated, the player is asked to either forgive or condemn one of the giant's heads. That head was a pacifist that disagreed with the other two heads for behaving violently. But without any detailed insight into this giant's history, into what arguments the third head had previously made against the others, into how much control each head truly exercised over the body, into how necessary meat-eating was for its diet, etc., I personally found it impossible to pass a judgement. There wasn't enough information. Of course, I had to pass a judgement to continue the game anyway.

Likewise, when confronted with a princess whose governing policies had allowed the giant to run rampant, the player must either criticize the princess for being too rational in her policy-making or agree with her that a person cannot be too rational. This seems beside the point, since one can implement poor policies while still attempting to act rationally. Again, without learning more details about precisely why and how the castle had been governed and what alternatives there might have been, I found it impossible to judge the princess.

When the game ended, my analysis was filled with unhelpful contradictions. I was told that sometimes I judge people harshly and that sometimes I'm forgiving. I agreed with the blackbird more often than the robin, but I also agreed with the robin and the blackbird about the same amount.

I suppose this muddled analysis does reflect my ambivalence toward many of the choices in the game, but it doesn't say anything. Despite that, I can't fault the game too much here, because I don't believe it's really possible to construct an accurate personality test. At least not in this fashion.