Detective Osiris

A murdered god wanders Ancient Egypt to inquire of gods and royals the mystery of his death. Sound intense? Detective Osiris does gesture towards its stentorian drama, like when sky goddess Nut muses on the strained symbiosis between humanity’s voraciousness and the gods’ creativities: “When we first created the world, it was tiny. It was so small, but it had everything we thought that people needed. / And, try as we might to provide everything, the mortals just kept expanding their efforts. They wanted more. More land for farming, more troves of natural resources, more things to discover, more knowledge of the world around them, and its limits. / So we kept making it bigger. We added more forests, then deserts, mountains, the ocean. Before long the people began to divide into countries. Sumer first, then Elam, and here in Egypt. / Shai tells me that one day, many summers and winters from now, humankind will set their sights on the sky itself. By then, they’ll scarcely even believe in us, only in themselves. So they’ll seek to conquer the sky with elaborate machinery, forged of metal. When that day comes, we’ll have to move even further away, and build more, for them to explore.” As an apotheosized mortal yet to develop an aspect, this polytheistic cosubstantiation through ideal and iteration offers a dizzy array of thematic jewels to inlay in Osiris’ reckoning with the divide between earth and sky.

An array that quickly proves too dizzying, as Detective Osiris retreats from its scope, modulating down into chatty ditziness that builds color through silliness rather than through a sustained tone. So we’re assured that Anubis is “a very good boy” and that Geb, an earth god, is “laying on the surface of the sky, face down, ensconced in a cloud of smoke. I recognise the scent: Cannabis.” Any heightened urgency posed by the setting melts in conversations like when we ask Maat, goddess of law and justice, about our murder: "Osiris, you too are now a god. There’s no need to bow, silly … I cant do anything about it other than be annoyed and wait for the guilty party to die. Or I have to go begging one of the more powerful gods to intervene and, y’know, do a plague or something. In normal circumstances. But, your wife did some magic, bingo bango, you’re back as a god.” Despite this weightless levity, the game also never really settles into comedy either, unable to transmute cheeriness into humor. The few times it does go for a joke, the results aren’t exactly electric: “Geb rolls his eyes. “At night, I could be watching sex. So that’s what I was doing. When you were killed, I wasn’t looking in the right direction.” / I’m beginning to see some of the attraction in watching the mortals. For the first time in the afterlife, I truly grin.”

Despite its many tonal jumps, Detective Osiris never truly surrenders its ambition, particularly in a few passages of lyrical descriptions that flourish a lovely dazzle: “The crystalline surface of the sky is hard underfoot, and the air is thin. The sprawling country of Egypt is visible through the floor below. Ra gently guides his solar barque, carrying the sun, on an adjacent pellucid river. The celestial light douses the world below in light and warmth, but the temperature here is fresh, and the baked glass mezzanine sky smells like hot stone roads cooling in the night air.” Rather, the game is just kind of jittery and unsettled. Take its historicity as an example: there are some solid hits, like a shoutout to the much underrated Elamites or how Egyptians counted on their hands, and then there are some glaring errors, like mixing in Ptolemaic Alexandria with the clear Old Kingdom stylings. Sometimes these errors are so obvious that they likely are an intentional part of the silliness, such as the Sphinx’s joke about H always being in the middle of “akhet”, which is the transliteration of a hieroglyph. The result is an unevenness that never seems to settle into itself.

Whatever plays upon the surface, however, the underlying gearbox has no hesitations. The gameplay structure manages a clever magic trick of gently guiding you through an ever expanding playspace, keeping a firm control on the pacing of your journey without making you feel railroaded. No moment drags on too long, and the twist ending starkly reinterprets several of the characters you’ve met along the way. In this consummate craftsmanship, Detective Osiris manages a grounding that its narrative never quite achieves.