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Review
Mischief at the Masquerade, per the tagline, is a game where music plays an absolutely central role: the crime you’re trying to prevent is going to go down in an opera house, all the suspects and witnesses are musicians or conductors or theater-managers or patrons, and arcane knowledge about obscure musical tunings or the characteristics of obscure instruments can provide surprising insights into the plot. So I appreciate the game’s generosity in letting me play a character who, like me, is absolutely pants at this music wheeze.
See, unlike the other Lamp Post Productions games, this one’s an adventure/RPG hybrid, where you can customize the statistics of the detective protagonist: in addition to prioritizing your mental, physical, or social attributes, you can also decide on theater, society, or music theory as your key skills. Actually, they’re all useful, and the dice-rolling system is generous enough (you roll 1d4 plus your relevant stat against a difficulty that typically ranges from 3-5) that even your secondary priorities will likely succeed more often than not – the game’s interested in letting you inhabit whatever investigative archetype most appeals to you, not punishing you for inferior buildcraft (the fact that the dice rolls appear to be based off a seed, so reloading a saved game to try again always leads to the same result, also counter-intuitively reinforces this low-key vibe: it communicates that you’re expected to fail sometimes, it’s no big deal).
The system isn’t the game’s only nod to RPGs, because the “fantasy” of the title specifically refers to DnD – the setting is a version of Renaissance Venice peopled by half-orcs, gnomes, tieflings… I’ll admit, I found this matter-of-fact juxtaposition sometimes flirted with comedy:
"A bell rings with the opening door, which summons a distinguished-looking dragonborn from a back room. Her mature face is covered with bronze scales. She wears a pair of glasses and an elegant umber gown with satin bodice.
"'Good evening. I’m Chiara Canaletto. May I help you?'"
But Mischief is so earnest that I found myself getting into the swing of things quickly. It helps that the mystery is engagingly designed – the setup is that the city’s premier opera house has gotten wind that criminals might be targeting the opening of their new production, so they’ve hired you to investigate. This mostly involves talking to the cast and crew, snooping around the theater, and following up a few leads in the city; once you’ve got a workable theory of the case, that triggers a more action-oriented endgame. The various people you talk to are appealingly characterized, and beyond the who-what-where-when-how they provide in response to your questions, they also get across one or two personality traits: the vivacious star, the erudite conductor, the frazzled manager, the thoughtful costumer… it all plays out over the course of a day and a half, and there are close to a dozen characters you engage with, so none of them come off as especially deep, but as stereotypes go they’re certainly workable.
Solving the mystery involves creating a “hypothesis” – basically, you’re offered a choice of ten or so options for the suspect, the crime, the means, and the motive, and once you’ve got all those right you can try to stop the bad guys. The clues are parceled out efficiently and fit together in a satisfying way, with your character’s choice of focus areas feeling like an impactful way of determining which bits of info you’re most likely to come across. fI did take a couple of tries to crack the case, because I’d mixed up the primary and secondary motives for the crime, but there are in-game hints to prod you onto the right track with a minimum of fuss. The climax is nicely designed to allow any character to succeed, too – so long as you’ve figured everything out, your success is guaranteed, though more physically adept characters will catch the baddies with less of a commotion, which is a reasonable reward. And the attention to detail throughout is a lot of fun – I especially enjoyed that in the final interrogation scene, the preening mastermind monologues about all their plans, while the savvier minions lawyer up.
The last major element of the game worth mentioning is the romance angle. In some ways this doesn’t play out especially differently from how it’s handled in the author’s other games this Comp: you have a choice of six rather than four paramours this time out, but they’re similarly a pleasant, queer-friendly assortment of musicians and other opera hangers-on, with engaging but not too traumatic backstories. Sure, progress with them is gated by dice-rolls, but if you’re being polite and paying a modicum of attention to the kinds of things they like, you get enough bonuses that even bad luck can’t keep you from getting lucky.
I did find the pacing of the relationships pretty odd, though: as mentioned, the investigation plays out relatively quickly, and there are a lot of romanceable NPCs, so by the time you foil the bad guys you might have only had one or two short conversations with any of them, with discussion mostly focused on details of clues, alibis, and so on rather than anything personal. The romance actually kicks off after the detective plot is over; you can decide to dance with an NPC at the post-premiere ball, with successful flirting leading to a longer date in the subsequent scene, at which point the game ends. This makes for an odd structure, I thought, since it feels like the romances are tacked on after the story has pretty much reached its climax; what’s here is well-written and fun, don’t get me wrong, but it does wind up slightly distorting the narrative harmony.
Still, having a pleasant coda after all the banging and crashing is done is an appropriate way to wrap up a story about an opera – or so I assume, see the disclaimer about how little I know about classical music – and besides, I could have just declined to dance with anyone if I’d felt like playing a just-the-facts-m’aam Joe-Friday-alike. The bones here are solid, and Mischief at the Masquerade is a very good time even if you don’t know your andante from your largo.
