A Murder in Fairyland

A Murder in Fairyland is a mystery game in which you play as a sorceress who gets stuck in Fairyland when the titular murder, of a candidate for the Autumn Throne, leads to travel restrictions (though probably not for the reasons you'd expect). Upon petitioning the Summer Queen, Titania, for permission to leave, the PC is graciously granted the opportunity (as the fairies would have it) to investigate the crime. This is complicated not by the typical issue of everyone trying to hide anything that might make them seem suspicious, but by all the other candidates claiming credit--being seen to have killed a powerful fairy will increase their political clout. Unfortunately for the PC, this isn't actually any easier to untangle.

The game, which takes place in the universe of Corfman's Open Sorcery games, is as deftly written as one might expect from the author. I always love a humorous juxtaposition of the mundane and the fantastic, and this game certainly delivers on that. One early puzzle, for example, sees you filing an ADA complaint to get a ramp installed so you can get into the palace (as the PC is a wheelchair user); the complaint form both needs to know the alignment of the ley line beneath the palace and inexplicably asks multiple times about whether the violation occurred in Yonkers. Meanwhile, you also have to unscramble some of the PC's memories to gain access to a certain spell, and these memory portions are written in a more poetic style that is lyrical and evocative. I might recommend this more to fans of 16 Ways to Kill a Vampire at McDonald's than to fans of The Absence of Miriam Lane, but certainly Corfman's talent for snarky urban fantasy humor and her ability to work in a more literary vein are both on display here. My only quibble about the writing is that the magic-as-programming conceit of the Open Sorcery series, which I remember as being fairly central to the original Open Sorcery game, is so peripheral here as to barely come up, which means that players not familiar with the setting may find the few mentions that exist to be extraneous and perhaps incongruous.

This brings me to the main downside of this game, in my view. A Murder in Fairyland is, as far as I can tell, intended to both function as a standalone and be a promo for Open Sorcery: Sea++ (with which it shares a protagonist), and these two goals are somewhat in tension. While playing Murder I had the persistent feeling that I was playing a demo (albeit a very substantial one). Worldbuilding aside, this mostly isn't due to the writing; the story is pretty self-contained and resolves in a satisfying way (or at least, it can if your investigation is successful). It's more the gameplay that gives this impression. There are a whole lot of mechanics introduced and then barely used: the initial puzzle that you would think would be the one that teaches you the basics so that the mechanic can be used for more complex puzzles later turns out to be the only time that mechanic ever comes up. This is true, for example, of unscrambling memories to compile spells and using elemental motes to affect your environment. There's also a word search mechanic that looks at first as if it's going to be a large part of the game but vanishes completely before you even get to the murder investigation bit. So it feels like most of those things exist to give you a taste of what the "full" game is like, rather than actually playing an integral role in A Murder in Fairyland as a standalone game.

And I admit that I feel like this made the game a little harder and more frustrating for me at times. On the one hand, the one-off mechanics felt a little less intuitive for being one-offs; on the other, the diversity of mechanics in the intro portion kept me from really getting into the mindset of "what form can I use to solve this problem?" that would have been useful for the main investigative portion. (Yes, solving the mystery mainly requires becoming well acquainted with fairy bureaucracy.) I appreciated the in-game hints provided by one of the PC's spells (this is what got me through the one-off elemental motes puzzle), but these aren't available in every situation, so for the other puzzle I got legitimately stuck on (as opposed to the one where I had just overlooked something very obvious, which is completely on me), I had to look elsewhere. I did find what I needed in the comments of Autumn's review, but it was disheartening to click on the official hints file and have it basically just tell me that I can skip all the puzzles if I want to. Which, sure, but I didn't actually want to skip over the most interesting parts of the game! I just wanted a little nudge in the right direction!

All this being said, I did enjoy the game more than I didn't; the mystery portion is well designed and I got most of the evidence I needed without any outside help. I also spent an inordinate amount of time on the tarot-based set-building minigame that refuses to explain its rules to you, which is exactly the kind of thing my brain loves to gnaw on. In case anyone needs the Chaos motes but is not so inclined to spend a lot of time puzzling out the rules, here's what I figured out about scoring:

Overall, A Murder in Fairyland is an enjoyable game that I would recommend to fans of mystery games, funny urban fantasy, and/or Corfman's other work. Just don't get too attached to those early-game mechanics.