The Killings in Wasacona

This is a murder mystery game in which you play as an FBI agent who’s been called in to investigate a string of murders (possibly the work of a serial killer, possibly not) in a small town in Washington. Over the course of several days, the player must choose how to spend their investigation time, and at the end they are asked a series of questions to see how much they’ve managed to figure out.

The Killings in Wasacona clearly takes heavy inspiration from tabletop games, starting out by making you distribute your character’s stats and then having skill checks done via a link that says “Roll a d20.” The simulated dice were kind to me in my playthrough and I passed most checks for skills that I didn’t have penalties to, so my experience wasn’t frustrating in this regard, but I still didn’t love this as a design choice. I found it made me feel like, rather than playing a game that was simulating solving a murder, I was playing a game that was simulating playing another game that was simulating solving a murder, which had a distancing effect that kept me from ever truly getting invested. The many spelling/grammar/punctuation errors and occasional clunky attempts at poetic language in high-drama scenes also distracted me, although as an editor I’m aware that I notice these things more than most people do.

I was also kind of uneasy at the way that it used the possibility of a racist cop committing violence against people of color as a red herring, and at the way that procedural red tape that exists to protect people’s rights, such as the need to obtain warrants, was treated as an annoying and unfair imposition. (The latter is of course very common in the genre, but that doesn’t mean I like to see it, and the fact that the game doesn’t even give you the option to actually do this stuff—you can either circumvent it via intimidation or give up—doesn’t help. I gather there are negatives to taking the intimidation route, but there are also negatives to just not getting the information, so it doesn’t quite feel like a “giving the player enough rope to hang themself” situation.)

Also, I don’t like picking on this kind of thing because in real life people can have all kinds of names, but when you have one singular Latina character in your game, naming her “Jamal” gives the unfortunate impression that the writer reached for a name that seemed “exotic” without bothering to check which cultures it’s commonly used in or which gender it’s commonly used for. The Somali refugee siblings also have the somewhat unlikely surname "Brown", and the country they come from is referred to as “Somali” instead of Somalia. Individually all of this seems like nitpicking, but it adds up to a sense that not a lot of care is being taken.

On the positive side, I liked the built-in graphical map, and I think the mystery was well-constructed (I managed to solve all the pieces of it and didn’t feel like I was wildly guessing on any of them). I liked the way the game laid out your evidence for each possible culprit before asking you to answer questions at the end, although I did wish it had used the suspects’ names (titles like "the drifter" may be clear enough, but there are a bunch of suspects who are professors at a local college, and they’re listed in this end-of-game evidence rundown as “the $subject professor”, which I had trouble keeping straight). And I enjoyed seeing the statistics at the end that showed what percentage of players had gotten various outcomes.

So the game does have a number of good aspects, and as far as I can tell most players liked it substantially more than I did and my opinion is not terribly representative of most people’s experiences. But I thought these points were worth raising, in case anyone else is particularly bothered by any of these things.

This Twine game feels very independent from other Twine traditions, with a gameplay style, styling and structure that seems derived from TTRPGS and gamebooks more than other past IFComp twine games, for instance.

It's a class police procedural murder mystery. Three bodies have been found, and you have to find the suspects! As an FBI agent, it is your job to investigate, interrogate, and accuse.

The game makes use of skills, which are set for you based on archetypes like 'Negotiator' or 'athlete'. This skills boost d20 rolls, which determine whether yo you fail or succeed.

This gives a random element to the game, and, according to the walkthrough I read after my playthrough, there are other, hidden random elements as well. This makes the game amenable to replay, but makes it difficult to win on the first try, especially without outside knowledge about the game.

The characters were generally interesting. I liked the family members most, then the suspects. The cops seemed fairly generic. The town and college had a vibrancy to them.

Overall, the game seemed very polished. I didn't agree with every gameplay decision, but I felt like I was playing a quality product while I was in the midst of the game.

It should surprise nobody that I'm playing the murder mysteries first, but this one feels nicely different from the rest in a way that makes a good change of pace. It's more "police procedural" than "whodunit novel"; you're a rookie FBI agent sent out on your first case, to find the truth behind a series of murders in a small American town.

The overall gameplay consists of driving around the town, trying to budget your time appropriately as you interview suspects, investigate crime scenes, and search for clues. Further events unfold at particular times, so it's important to watch the clock—the university president is only available in the mornings and afternoons, not the evenings, for example, so you might lose your chance to talk to her before the killer strikes again. This is a model that, to nobody's surprise, I think is very effective, and the graphical map (green circles for places you can visit, black circles for places you've exhausted all the options from) helps a lot in keeping it from feeling like a tedious list to lawnmower through. It makes Wasacona feel more like a town and less like a bulleted list.

The gameplay within scenes is somewhat different. Your character has five stats, chosen at the beginning of the game: Perception (finding clues), Academics (interpreting clues), Physical (moving around), Intimidation (getting information from suspects), and Intuition (reading people and detecting lies). They have to add up to zero, so I played as an "Analyst": Perception +3, Academics +6, Physical -6, Intimidation -6, Intuition +3.

Clues to the mystery tend to be gated behind one or more of these skills. When this happens, you roll a virtual d20, add your stat, and see if you got an 11 or above. Sometimes you need several rolls in a row to get a result—for example, you might need Perception to find footprints, Academics to identify the type of shoe, and Intimidation to get access to a suspect's shoe to compare it against—and this added an interesting tension to the investigation. You always know when there's something to be found, but your character didn't find it, which adds an interesting tone to things.

(Notably, getting information from suspects is always Intimidation; the killer is still out there and still killing, so you don't have time to get a warrant to access information the legal way. Your only recourse is to browbeat suspects until they let something slip, and whether you succeed or fail, they'll never talk to you again after that. It definitely gives the game a particular tone.)

I enjoyed my runthrough—and convicted the killer in three of the four murders—but I'm not sure I would have enjoyed it as much if I wasn't an Analyst. I only found two Physical checks in the entire game, for example, while Perception came up constantly. In the last murder ((Spoiler - click to show)Leroy Jameson), I failed an Academics roll early on, after which I never had a chance to get any more evidence about him, so I'm left with an impression that I could very well have gotten screwed by the dice out of finding evidence on any of the cases.

Overall, I liked this game a lot! It plays up the tragedy of the deaths in a way that a lot of classic murder mysteries don't, and the "morale" system (you get universal bonuses to all your rolls if you do things that keep the horror of it all from demotivating you, like eating a nice meal or bonding with some locals) played into that nicely. The writing was straightforward, but served its purpose well:

The neighborhood is quiet, very quiet; or perhaps that is just you, holding your breath.

I just have two main complaints (beyond the dice rolls, which—whether I liked it or not—I think it's good that the game stuck to its guns on them).

One, I wish it had been polished a bit more. The overall effect is so nice that the rough edges really stand out. For example, every time I take an action in the morgue, I get greeted by the coroner all over again; and even after I've built what I consider a very solid case against a suspect, the player character reacts with shock to finding each new piece of evidence: "If [NAME] was [new evidence], could he also be the killer?" Well, I certainly hope so, given that I've already arrested him for it!

Two, the walkthrough attached to the game shows how to get the best ending, but I have no idea how you could accomplish that without knowing the solution in advance. To prevent one of the murders, for example, you have to be patrolling in the right part of the city at the right time of night, ignoring the game unsubtly saying "you now get -3 to all rolls until you sleep". The only reason to do that (that I can tell, at least) is that you played it before and got the 911 call from that time and place.

All in all, though, I enjoyed this quite a lot, and I really hope the author continues to make more works in this vein.