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Review
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.
The puzzles are mostly smooth and well-designed, and some objects and features of the house are cleverly reused. I missed the integrated map that The Wise-Woman's Dog had at first, but soon realized that I could use GO TO [location] and FIND [person/object] to make navigating the house 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. 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. Sorry!)
