Detective Osiris

Hmm…as someone who wrote er own game about someone solving their own murder, I wanted to like this game more than I did. It was a surprisingly melancholy and somber one, for being named “Detective Osiris” and its blurb including many exclamation points.

To start more positively: I enjoyed the beautiful depiction of Egyptian gods, so rarely shown in comparison to the glut of Greek myth takes and European folklore out there (no shade on them, it's just nice to have variety!). It was cool to see the takes on the Egyptian pantheon and their cosmology, such as the dome of the sky producing this lovely image:

> the baked glass mezzanine sky smells like hot stone roads cooling in the night air.

In fact, the writing really shined the most when it was focusing on that sort of mythic imagery and making it more grounded and vivid. I also liked the endless ladder between the sky and earth, and the notes on Osiris’ exhaustion on account of his travel between the two realms (and also his being dead).

The portraits were well-drawn and I was eager to meet gods and see the illustrators’ take on them (though Khonsu’s portrait didn’t load!). Some of the gods’ voices were pretty distinctive, most notably Geb as a weed-smoking “content consumer” of humans’ little lives as if they were shows on TV. The music was very nice too.

On the critique side: This wasn’t much of a mystery, was it? Anyone who knows the real life myth of Osiris is probably going to accuse Set (as I did)—and even if they don’t, all noticeable signs point to him. The game really doesn’t foreshadow or indicate who the real killer was at all before its big reveal, aside from maybe the metagaming tactic of “surely they won’t just make the mystery’s answer the killer in the actual thousands-year-old myth, right?”

Also there were…two? Riddle-puzzles that I could actually identify: the Sphinx riddle and the pyramid riddle, and both allowed you to just trial and error them—I got the pyramid riddle wrong, being absolute garbage at math, but it hardly mattered because I was allowed to guess again. Granted the game does bill itself as only having “light puzzles” but I didn’t expect there to be that few…there might have been a third one I forgot about?

It was a pleasant enough experience and very beautiful visually, but to me as a mystery game and riddle designer, it failed to live up to its promise, and I felt all the more disappointed for that.