A Death in Hyperspace

First things first: when you play this game, turn off the time limit. For me, playing with a real-time counter on the screen turned my interaction with A Death in Hyperspace into an experience that was harrowing in all the wrong ways. And the game really doesn't need it.

With that out of the way, let's get to the review. This game was written by many authors, but it's not particularly large. In fact, each of the authors wrote a single character. This makes sense, because A Death in Hyperspace is a murder mystery in (what at first sight appears to be) a classic vein, and a murder mystery needs a lot characters -- as suspects. There's no good whodunnit without a large number of whos that might have dun it. And so it's your job as the space ship's AI to find out where the characters are, collect two clues about each of them, and then decide which of them to accuse.

Interestingly, there (Spoiler - click to show)doesn't seem to be any truth to be found; or rather, whomever you choose to accuse, it will always be presented as the right person. It feels a little more canonical to decide that the captain died from natural causes, in part because it's asymmetric compared to the other endings, and in part because you only unlock it on your second playthrough. Otherwise, though, anything goes. That's fine. The traditional murder mystery where all is revealed at the end is way too comforting; it's good to shake things up once in a while, and this is a way of shaking things up that requires the medium of interactive fiction, so it's a good fit. More could have been done with the moral implications of the baseless accusations that we indulge in in most endings, but I guess the authors wanted to keep things light-hearted.

Gameplay is not entirely successful. On the one hand, the game wants you to play more than once. On the other, it quickly turns into an exercise in finding two clues per character, accusing them, and collecting another ending for your trophy case.

What is most interesting about the piece is the experience of playing this obviously naive AI whose reading of murder mysteries completely structures the way they see the situation. It’s like Northanger Abbey, except mystery instead of romance. There is something fairly hilarious about the inane questions and accusations that form most of one’s dialogue options. Underneath the somewhat mechanical mystery, there is a poignant little comedy playing out, where the player character is too blinded by grief and excitement to see the plain truth: (Spoiler - click to show)that the captain died of natural causes. That is ultimately the point of the game.

I often like IF collaborations quite a lot – Cragne Manor ranks quite high on my all-time favorites list – but they often present a tradeoff: when you’ve got a bunch of authors bringing just their one or two best ideas to the party, the novelty and energy can be infectious, but at the same time, that diversity can fray at the unity of a piece, reducing the impact that any particular element might have on the work as a whole and cramming in too many diverse themes to fully cohere. That’s why reading the blurb for A Death in Hyperspace made me a bit apprehensive: having ten authors work on a game that only lasts about an hour seems like it could be a recipe for chaos. Once I started playing, I was surprised to find that wasn’t at all the case – this tale of a spaceship’s AI investigating the death of its captain maintains a very consistent tone and approach while putting a novel spin on the sci-fi whodunnit genre. If anything, I actually found myself wishing for a bit more of the aforementioned chaos.

After an introduction establishes the murder and lays out the interface, you’re given a roster of about a dozen crew and passengers and access to the various rooms within you where they may be found, and told how investigation proceeds: encountering each character allows to engage in dialogue with them, including asking standardized questions getting to motive, alibi, and anything suspicious they might have seen; the initial conversation also unlocks a piece of evidence that can be found elsewhere on the ship and which, when found, will enable you to further corroborate or undermine the testimony you get in future conversations. Meanwhile, a somewhat-unintuitive “murder board” interface lets you lay out your assessments of how credible each person’s story is, ultimately allowing you to end the game once you’ve made a critical mass of decisions.

It’s easy to see how the structure of the game was created to support collaboration: it appears that the other authors all came up with a character and were responsible for writing the conversations with them, while the organizer or organizers were responsible for the connective tissue. This organizational scheme does allow the various pieces to be stitched together cleanly, but it does mean that there isn’t as much interaction between them as you might expect: often, I’d be having a potentially-incriminating conversation with one suspect while three others were standing right there, with no acknowledgment of the awkward circumstances. It also slowed down an opening that I already found quite slowly-paced: I felt like I had to read the crew roster before jumping into interrogations in order to understand who I was talking to and what they might say about their fellows, but it appears that the roster entries were written to a common format, which made me feel like I was listening to a dozen people tell me about their DnD characters one after another.

Because the thing is, I mostly found the characters dull. They all have one or two interesting sci-fi-y characteristics – there are a couple different kinds of aliens, there’s a cyborg, someone who’s hallucinating while in the throes of hyperspace madness – but given that the only experience of them the game offers is interrogation by a ship’s computer that’s read too many murder-mysteries, there isn’t much room for details of personality to come through in anything but a schematic way. Several of them are also explicitly designated as minimally-interactive red herrings, too, and given that I had a hard time keeping track of a large cast boasting generally-forgettable names (look, I’m not 12 any longer, I’m not going to be able to remember which one is “Until Tomorrow” vs. “Lament Tynes” vs. “Keen Oculus”; at least there are a couple, like “VX2s-K3r BÆSDF”, that are memorably awful) that meant I spent a lot of time clicking on people, finding they didn’t have anything new or interesting to say, and clicking out.

This sense of lassitude is exacerbated by the way the game encourages lawnmowering. You need to loop through every location at least two or three times, since the pieces of “evidence” aren’t findable until you’ve met the appropriate character, at which point you need to loop back for a follow-up conversation, but it’s worse than that because characters can move around. You can track down specific people through the roster feature, but since that means you might miss evidence, it felt like the game was encouraging me to play it by mechanically running through each location and talking to each character over and over until I’d exhausted the content. The conversational structure is also fairly rigid from one character to the next, with few interesting choices to engage the player: many reduce to either behaving normally and asking direct questions, or indulging your murderino streak and wildly leaping to accuse suspects just to see how they’ll react.

Indeed, investigation isn’t that satisfying either; I can’t tell for sure, but I think this is one of those quantum mysteries where every suspect potentially did it or maybe no one did. There are few hard clues to go on (there’s no sign of foul play on the body, and you automatically decline the doctor’s offer to do an autopsy), with your interrogations mostly turning up shifty backstory elements rather than actual evidence; meanwhile, the connection between the “clues” you find and their impacts often felt abstract to me (one of them was a teddy bear that didn’t seem to have anything to do with anything?) Beyond that, the game’s promise of 11 different endings makes it seem likely that they’re all like the one I saw, which constructed a plausible-seeming case for why the suspect I picked might have done it – unfortunately, because the game’s save feature isn’t included in the sidebar but rather nested underneath a game menu link that I didn’t think to return to after toggling some initial settings, I didn’t make a save allowing me to test this theory, though regardless it does seem like at least one ending requires you to do a full replay of the game.

For all this griping, there were a few specific elements I definitely thought worked; the one character who had a sense of humor was actually quite funny to me (though I’m not sure it was a great idea to have the single Black person in the cast speak with an accent called out with nonstandard spelling and punctuation). Pearl, the ship’s AI, is also appealingly keen to find the captain’s killer. If the game had provided characters whose voices similarly took up more space, and loosened up its structure to allow for deeper subplots or more involved investigative tracks, it would probably have made A Death in Hyperspace a woolier, more awkward beast – but one that I think I would have liked far more than the overly-sterile version that we got.

This is definitely my cup of tea - a scifi murder mystery where you are the ship's computer trying to figure out who killed the captain. I really like the work that has gone into the premise and writing of this game, and the mechanics are really clever. Learning the backstories of the characters and piecing together their motivations is an intensely satisfying way to experience a story.

I thought the time limit would be irritating but it did really ramp up the tension in quite an interesting way.

I felt that A Death in Hyperspace is trying something a bit different and mostly succeeding. I recommend giving it a play.

There are some negative points but they are slightly spoilerish, if you have any interest in this kind of thing just play the game before reading on - it is short and enjoyable.

(Spoiler - click to show)With so much effort put into creating the world and the fascinating characters, I was disappointed that the actual murderer is random. Normally I am all for replayability but for a murder mystery I like a definitive answer and learning that it changes every playthrough cheapens it a little bit in my opinion. There is never that "a-ha!" moment where the subtle clue clicks into place and the solution revealed.

This game's list of author's includes every published Choice of Games author who has been nominated for a Nebula Award, which is pretty neat.

This is a real-timed murder mystery. You are a sentient AI running a ship, named Pearl (both the AI and the ship, who are one). You have blacked out for 10 minutes during a jump into hyperspace, only to discover that your captain is dead.

You are ready to investigate, but there is an issue: hyperspace can cause hallucinations of distorted realities. Without some kind of consensus of the beings on the ship, reality could be stuck forever; with consensus, it could be permanently altered (or at least resolve into one or more paths).

Gameplay consists of moving from room to room, interviewing suspects and picking up pieces of evidence. Almost everyone gets the same set of questions.

You have a murderboard where you can adjust your suspicion of others between Low, Medium, and High. Once you adjust it to high or accuse someone, the game ends and you get an ending.

Here's what I liked and what I struggled with:

**Likes**
-The variety in characters was nice. That's probably the best part of having this many authors. While all characters had different backstories, I liked Primus's story (my first ending), and Ceri's was completely bizarre (does she (Spoiler - click to show)exist in the same reality as anyone else? is she (Spoiler - click to show)real???)
-The interface was smooth, and I found few bugs (only one I can remember is a stray close-bracket at the bottom of one ending)
-The game is relatively short and easy to replay

**Things I struggled with**
-Having the same conversation options with everyone was really hampering, especially as they weren't 'really' choices, in a way. The game said not to anger anyone, but your choices or 'do thing' or 'do thing in a rude way'. It feels like playing a game where the options are 'sword that does 5 damage to enemies' or 'sword that does 5 damage to players'. So it really felt like I had one choice at a time when talking to characters, and those choices were all the same, making them feel less individualistic. Maybe that's the way the writing was done? (sending out a spreadsheet with a list of the same murder-related questions to everyone and asking them to create a character and their responses to those questions), but I think it would have been neater to have questions tailored to those individual characters, especially when they had obviously interesting or suspicious behavior you can't follow up on.
-I'm not sure why we can set Low, Mid, or High suspicion levels, since you can only up a level when you get more evidence and the murderboard already tells you how much evidence you have.
-The nature of the endings means that (Spoiler - click to show)there's not necessarily a cannon (outside of one special ending). I teach a class called Theory of Knowledge, and we do murder mysteries each year that students right, then discuss means of obtaining knowledge, perspective, and ethics. We just performed this year's mysteries today, actually! But the first time we did this, one student wrote a table top murder game where the murderer was chosen by dice roll, but nothing changed about the evidence. The other students were outraged by this (despite liking the rest of the mystery) because it took away agency and made the knowledge obtained earlier unreliable and useless That's kind of how I felt about the alternate endings.
-The timer didn't work well for me. At first I felt rushed to hurry, but I got enough evidence for an ending in 10 minutes, so I felt bad for not giving the game as much attention as it asked for.

Overall, this game was fun. I noticed the download was just a redirect; I hope some version of it is stored in the IFarchive, because it would be nice to preserve it for future generations (and also because IFComp is about making games that are freely available forever); and there's nothing preventing it from being downloadable from the site it's hosted on, I was able to save a local copy and run it just fine.

The thing I'll probably remember longest is Ceri, as she's still a mystery to me.