Miss Gosling's Last Case

I went into reviewing Miss Gosling’s Last Case by Daniel M. Stelzer with a certain amount of trepidation. I had picked this game as my re-introduction to the world of IF after a break of over 35 years. Would this game be as good as my memories from the golden era of interactive fiction in the 1980s? Well, the short answer is that I loved this game but in the interest of a more meaningful review I should probably elaborate.

The idea to have the spiritual link between owner and pet dog as driving the gameplay mechanic was inspired. Here, the (deceased) owner is relegated to being the narrator and all actions are performed by the canine companion. This puts an interesting twist on puzzle solving and there are a number of ingenious puzzles in this game with objects that are extremely well implemented, e.g. the dumbwaiter.

The narrative writing was excellent with pitch perfect asides from Miss Gosling that really brought the game world to life. The overall quality of both story and puzzles was reminiscent of Infocom at it’s best and I can easily imagine this as one of the grey box releases with the in-game map and newspaper article cuttings as the “feelies” that might be included.

The puzzles were challenging enough to require some offline thought but none were so difficult that I needed to rely on the in-built help system. In fact, a number of the more challenging puzzles had multiple “wrong” actions that provided subtle hints to the correct solution.

There were two minor aspects to the story that I didn’t like.

• At one point our canine hero is forced to make a death-defying leap onto the corpse of his former owner. I fear that this will lead to prolonged nightmares for Watson and require some significant doggy therapy to get over. As this effectively happens in the second act I wonder whether it would be less jarring (at the risk of a slightly harder landing) to the have the corpse removed in between acts one and two.

• The police officers appear to have gone to the Dick van Dyke school of regional accents as a number of the lines they speak seem particularly inauthentic and they seem more caricature than in-character.

Overall, I really enjoyed this game and would happily play a follow-up adventure. For me, this has shown that the IF renaissance is alive and well and I look forward to exploring other works by Daniel M. Stelzer. Dare I say it, perhaps now is the true golden era of interactive fiction…

Amateur sleuth Miss Gosling has been murdered, and the incompetent police are looking in all the wrong places--so it's up to the ghostly detective to figure out who really dunnit, as usual. Investigating your own death is a surprisingly robust subgenre of mystery IF, but this is the only one I know of where the deceased protagonist must act by instructing her pet dog, the aptly named Watson.

This makes it stand out a bit, not just among mystery games but among the kind of medium-dry-goods parser puzzler that it is (this is a "solve the puzzles, automatically solve the mystery" type of deal similar to Who Iced Mayor McFreeze?) because you have to think about how you can communicate with a dog and what a dog is capable of doing. Watson is, of course, unusually intelligent (even for a collie!) but there are still limitations.

At first I missed the integrated ASCII map that The Wise-Woman's Dog had--not that the house is very big, but I get turned around easily and all the similar garden locations were hard for me to keep track of--but I soon realized that I could use GO TO [location] and FIND [person/object] to make navigation quick and easy, and I appreciated that.

The writing lightly pastiches Agatha Christie and does a good job hitting the tone of a Miss Marple book, but Miss Gosling does feel like her own specific character, not a discount Marple. I appreciate all the little characterization notes that contribute to that effect, such as her colorblindness leading to interior decoration choices others find tacky, and that she has a sort of home health aide and feels a little awkward about it even as she appreciates the necessity, and that she has a sort of mentorlike fondness for one of the police officers, Davis, but wishes Davis would be a little more proactive in her career. And, of course, there's her relationship with Watson, which is very endearing.

The game is very friendly to a parser newbie, both due to the overall design and the way that Dialog allows for link-based interaction. (Sometimes it might have been a little too beginner-friendly for me--I was mildly irritated by a tutorial trying to walk me through starting the first puzzle when I was already halfway through solving it.) A couple of puzzles were a little more finicky than I would have liked, but overall it plays smoothly and is a lot of fun, and some objects and features of the house are cleverly reused for several puzzles. It's well-paced and substantial without being a huge time commitment. It's a great way to spend a few hours of your evening, especially if you're a fan of Golden Age mystery fiction.

(A final note: People were often surprised when I mentioned, previously, that I hadn't played this game, because I participated in a metapuzzle in IFComp 2024 in which clues to solving the game's optional bonus puzzle were hidden in other games, one of which was mine. I really did want to play it, but every year IFComp ends without me getting to any number of well-regarded games that I was very interested in. As for the puzzle itself, well, I still haven't played BOSH or The Den, so the only step I was able to complete was the one that was hinted in my own game. My apologies to everyone whose awesome IFComp game I have not played yet!)

With Inform's core code having grown so much that only the smallest scenarios produced by it will still fit within Z-machine, one might wonder whether that venerable format is destined for the dustbin of history. Sure, there are still people actively using Inform 6 with the PunyInform library to make Z-code games for retrocomputing platforms, but that's a niche within a niche. With this work, author Daniel Stelzer proves that the Z-machine is still a vital platform when used with the relatively new but sophisticated Dialog language.

Miss Gosling's Last Case plays very well. Puzzles are meticulously designed and well-suited to appeal to those who would be attracted to the murder mystery genre -- requiring an active imagination that takes careful notice both of what is said and what can be imagined about the scenario being depicted.

Only basic verbs and simple commands are in use, a constraint imposed by the separation of story protagonist from primary actor. By ensuring that there is an in-game reason for preferring simplicity, the player is subconsciously prompted to throw out any ideas for actions that cross a certain low threshold of complexity. It gives something of the feel of a limited parser game without actually being one.

The game's text has an emphasis on providing backstory and characterization, largely eliding physical descriptions of the scene outside of a few key objects. This is done skillfully -- at first I did not notice the style, because room description text provides introductory exposition as the player gets familiar with the situation. Should the lack of detail become noticeable, that is a cue the player should simplify the approach being taken. The object implementation is spare enough that, should imagination fail, even brute force approaches are likely to pay off within a reasonable number of commands.

Quite a lot of work has been put into creating a smooth and seamless play experience. New players will benefit from many "invisible" parts of the system that are designed to support that goal. First and foremost are >FIND and >GO TO verbs that make navigation as simple as can be. Object disambiguation is handled with a numbered selection that makes it very clear how the parser is "thinking," and that in combination with very descriptive error messages will rapidly train a new player in the preferred method of interaction. More subtly, the game design itself ensures a sharp focus on specific goals at all times, even during the middle game when one has a choice of order in which to pursue subgoals. Lastly, the introductory scene offers a tutorial voice that is sure to help total newbies get started with a parser, though it is extraneous to someone familiar with the form.

My initial impulse is to give this game four stars, which translates roughly as "distinctly above average" and/or "highly recommended" in my rating scale, but there are a couple of minor shortcomings that keep it just below that threshold. One of the segments (Spoiler - click to show)(involving identifying a rosebush of blooms with a particular color) does not feel as well-implemented as the others. (Spoiler - click to show)Specifically, although a point is awarded when the correct actions have been taken, the player is not notified about which rosebush is correct and must deduce it from some diagrams. This is not difficult, but neither is it particularly interesting, and stylistically it is out of step with the rest of the work by adding even a speck of unnecessary friction. Also, the multiple locations of the tea garden just seem "deader" than other parts of the house from a writing perspective; they are restricted to repetitive descriptions of largely undifferentiated locations with few objects. Perhaps less important but worthy of adjustment is the pacing in the final scene. (Spoiler - click to show)It took several tries to work out the correct move to trigger a win, and it felt very arbitrary that it should be that move which does so. Repeated barking should be just as effective given the situation, and would be the low-friction option to conclude the game after the real puzzle has been solved. As a final nitpick, it would be nice to be able to turn off the tutorial mode at the beginning. (Note that any or all of these criticisms may have been negated in release 2, which was recently posted.)

I'm going to go ahead and round up a bit for my star rating, though I'll hold off on letting it count toward the average in the hopes of a post-comp release to sand off the handful of remaining rough edges. In the meantime, I do very much recommend this piece to anyone looking for a bit of fun, and I would even suggest it (with reference to the provided hints, if needed) as a first experience with IF for someone who likes the murder mystery genre. My hat is off to Stelzer for creating a first-class introductory work easily on a par with Infocom's best of that type. Bravo!

[Note: It turns out that much of the preceding unintentionally -- but almost exactly -- echoes an off-site review by PB Parjeter, which was written prior to this and to which I've added a link on the game's page here. I guess that's evidence that the observations are well-founded!]