The Empty Chamber: A Celia Swift Mystery

This game is a fine addition to the long tradition of murder mystery interactive fiction games.

This is a one-room game. You, Celia Swift, are aiding Inspector Land in researching the mystery of an orchestra member's death.

There are two phases: a puzzle-based investigative phase, and a deduction phase.

The investigative phase requires patience, and the deduction phase doesn't give too much away if you guess wrong.

The one thing that mars this game is the large number of unhelpful responses. If a second edition were released, or a similar game released in the future, I would wish for more custom responses.

I was seriously disappointed with this game; it was over far to quickly!

Already from the opening introduction I was feeling very hopeful, anticipating some properly stimulating problem solving. Typing the recommended help command only served to intrigue me further:

This is a story set inside one room, which you can regard by typing look (or simply l). There's no need to move around, but there are plenty of things to examine (x), to touch, and even to smell, and various fixtures to open or close. You won't find any items to pick up - this is a crime scene, after all - but Celia always carries her lockpick, just in case she needs to unlock something.

Typing map (m) will show you the room layout, while deduce will trigger the ending sequence - note that you can do this at any time. You may also want to ask land about relevant topics, such as the victim, or Celia herself.

Overall I quite enjoyed this one, but hit a few significant snags. Starting with the things I liked: it's a one-room mystery, and that single room is nicely dense without being overwhelming. Examining things closely, opening containers to reveal their contents, hunting down every possible clue, was very fun and satisfying--it really felt like being a detective. Having two characters I could question about background info or items I turned up added an additional dimension to the investigation that nicely complimented the object-examination/manipulation gameplay. I also enjoyed the details of the work's 1950 setting, with the victim being a World War II vet who spent his free time playing in the London Veterans' Orchestra and listening to radio dramas in his rented flat.

Eventually, though, I hit a wall in my investigations. I felt like I'd been quite thorough, but didn't know where to find the code. While earlier I'd wondered if there was something (Spoiler - click to show)on the back of the photo, when I tried to treat the frame and photo as separate objects, the game made it clear that no "photograph" object existed, so I gave that up. But David Welbourn's walkthrough showed me that you need to specifically (Spoiler - click to show)open the frame; once you do, a photograph object will magically appear. I also figured out that something was up with (Spoiler - click to show)the doorknob, but for the life of me I couldn't discern what it was or how to investigate it further. Again turning to the walkthrough, I saw that the required command was something I never would have thought to try. (For anyone else who's stuck there and doesn't want to risk seeing spoilers in the walkthrough: (Spoiler - click to show)you need to smell it. I really wish there had been in-game hints, because all I needed for those two things was a nudge in the right direction.

Finally, I haven't been able to figure out the correct answer to the final deduction question. Welbourn's walkthrough is based on Release 1 (which doesn't seem to be available anywhere anymore), which only had five deduction questions, but the current version, Release 5, has six. I've only found two answers for the final question that the game will accept, but neither is actually correct. So this mystery will have to remain forever slightly unsolved!

Edit: I just used Glulx Strings to determine the answer. There are actually multiple that are accepted as correct, including (Spoiler - click to show)"love", "revenge", and "frame", and then you'll also need to answer the follow-up question correctly to get credit. The motive question is confusing, IMO; I read it as asking for the (Spoiler - click to show)motive of the person who shot Hackett, but it's actually asking you to explain in one word (Spoiler - click to show)the entire weird setup with the doorknob gun.