Number of Reviews: 7
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Pet Dog, Solve Crime, January 5, 2024Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
This is an Ink piece where you are Osiris solving the mystery of your mortal life’s murder. Presentation-wise it is attractive - nicely curated palette, page layout, music and illustrations. Don’t know if Ink lends itself to strong presentation, or it attracts authors with strong skills, but it’s getting a rep in my head.
The prose style is an often amusing mix of stilted old-timey patter and modern turns of phrase for spice. It Sparks more than not, but does make for some probably unwanted artifacts like this:
"I run my fingers down the pipe, to where the hot embers are, and let it burn my bandaged fingers. Just to see if it hurts. It does, but I seem to recover instantly, with no long term ill effects. Good to know that I can still feel something."
Without the mixed tone, this might not have come across as jarringly emo as it does. Later, a full on sex scene introduces yet another dissonant tone, however well written it was for these types of things. (I should highlight it is later (Spoiler - click to show)narratively justified, though I sat with the awkwardness of it for a long time.)
There were a lot of Sparks of Joy in this, I particularly enjoyed the ability to pet Anubis, which I did at every opportunity. (This was privately hilarious to me, as thanks to my annual Halloween bad-horror movie binge, I had recently watched The Pyramid which features a decidedly… different… Anubis.)
This is a choice-select piece which I am coming to believe is the more challenging mystery-solving paradigm. For an author I mean. Part of the charge of mystery solving is filling in the vast space of possibility through a series of logical conclusions until you can derive the solution. By its nature, choice-select, just the mechanism of it, seems to do more of it than the player. If presented with an option “Confront X on their flimsy alibi,” if the player wasn't actually suspicious, the space is filling in and mystery solving itself without them. To me, this piece did not successfully navigate that challenge, though I do appreciate that presenting expended dialogue options as “Ask about X (Again)” is a nifty way to both red herring and clue an evolving understanding.
As I exhausted the clue space, I was presented with one option of suspect to accuse. It is possible, I suppose, that I blundered past other clues that might have opened more to me. I am at a loss to see what I left unclicked though. In any case, real or not, it FELT like the game was steering me to a specific accusation and absent other options I took it. (Interestingly, it gave me an “Are you sure?” question, which No, I was not! Felt like a frameup! Sadly that did not change anything.)
(Spoiler - click to show)Sure enough, frameup. The real killer was dutifully revealed without any need for me the player to get involved. This really took the wind out of my sails. The entire game I was led to believe my efforts would solve the case, when in the end the game just did it all. It overpoweringly felt like the game was always on rails, and I only had the ILLUSION of mystery solving. Since I WAS the protagonist, the Epilogue sting in particular fell really flat for me because of this.
Between the occasional awkward text moments and the bait and switch “YOU solve it! LOLNVM I got this.” it could not breach into Engaging. Definite Sparks though. “Who’s a good boy? Who’s a good boy? aNUBis is… aNUBis is, yes he is!”
Played: 11/1/23
Playtime: 50min,finished
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks, Notable headfaked player agency
Would Play After Comp?: No, mystery solved!
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless