Pride and Prejudice and Murder

Pride and Prejudice and Murder

I instantly thought of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies when I saw this, so much so that when I started reading I was surprised that there were no zombies at all, until I remembered. Then I locked in.

I'll be honest, I didn't like this when I started, but I came out at the end liking it a bit better. Let me explain why.

Writing-wise, the game leans a little too heavily on familiarity with the book Pride and Prejudice. What I mean is, especially in early scenes, character interactions are often more like "Here's Catherine de Bourgh! We all know what she's like ha ha. Anyway here's Darcy. Classic Darcy." Someone with no knowledge of the books would be hard pressed to identify strong character traits of the different people involved or to develop a liking or detest for them. The original pride and prejudice used wordplay and dialogue to establish unique personalities, and this game just struggles to match the quality of one of the world's greatest books.

This is compounded by the structure of the chapters, which have huge info dump pages with very few choices. These describe every character, which is what takes a while.

But, as the game goes on, things improved in my opinion. I've often seen it with authors that the later chapters get a lot better than the first due simply to practice. That's why in my non-Choice script games, I usually write the beginning last, when I'm at my full strength. With Choicescript games go you generally either send things to an editor linearly or release them publicly linearly, so it's hard to do that.

Anyway, as the authors begin the actual mystery, pretty much all the 'original', non-Pride and Prejudice content is pretty good. I liked the description of the mystery and the setup. The last chapter was a lot of fun for me. It's like the opposite of that old saying. The old saying is "It was original and fun, but the original part wasn't fun and the fun part wasn't original." This game is the opposite of that to me: "The original part is fun, but the unoriginal parts were boring."The choice structure came down to picking between several viewpoint characters and solving on occasional riddle or clue, as well as choosing the final mystery. I've done some classification of mystery games before (I'll quote from upthread):1-Have a standard puzzle game that happens to be about murder mystery, with solving the puzzles leading to solving the mystery. This is like Ballyhoo.2-Modelling evidence and clues in-game, which have to be combined to form a solution. This is how Erstwhile works, and most of my mysteries.3-Collecting evidence through puzzles and conversation and then having a quiz at the end (where you have to accuse the right person). This is how Toby’s Nose works.4-Collecting physical evidence and showing it to someone, being able to make an arrest when you have enough evidence.

This is mostly like number 1, you don't do that much detecting, it's more gathering clues and the game explains the mystery. I also believe there are multiple 'real' murderers, which, if true, is always a bit of a bummer to me, as it implies that reader had no chance of solving the mystery on their own (since the murderer is not determined to the end).

So overall this is a game that started out weak for my tastes but continually improved until the end.