A Death in Hyperspace

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

Man, is hyperspace a great metaphor for my experience with this game, especially THIS game’s version of hyperspace. Isolated enclosure murder mysteries are well suited to a sci-fi implementation - what could be more forbidding, more confining than the depths of space? Add a super well-conceived vision of hyperspace as a psychologically corrosive OTHER space just adds fuel to an already glowing fire as it were, and gives the game a ticking clock to solve against: stay too long and the humans might go insane!

Not only is this really cool conceit very effectively established, I cannot describe the charge I got seeing that it was an ACTUAL REALTIME TIMER! Holy crap, I better start clicking! Good thing I am an AI computer that thinks in nanotime! In the moment, I didn’t even have cause to question, “Wait, WHY is that timer so definitive? Surely sci-fi forensics would solve things, once we land?” If nothing else, as the ship’s AI, I wanted to solve it, not leave it to some meatbag with a tricorder.

From there, gameplay segues into a series of suspect interviews, where, as these things often do, it seems EVERYONE has a reason to kill the victim! (Why are we ALWAYS traveling on (Spoiler - click to show)the Orient Express in these things??? Can’t we just once take the 7:21 train up three stops?) The mystery solving gameplay is kind of an underutilized one, at least as far as my mystery IF experience goes. You are looking to match stories to physical evidence to buttress or refute testimony, and thereby establish who might be lying. Between the ever ticking clock and the breadth of suspects there is a LOT to do, and the speed with which it gets done is equal parts frenetic and deliberate. I was constantly metering my impulse to speed up, to ensure I didn’t miss relevant details. I was fighting the mentally clouding effects of the timer as things speeded on, just like the hyperspace effects on my meaty passengers! That was pretty cool. The notebook portion of the game was just about perfect - summarizing interviews and evidence, and allowing me, robot detective, to decide whether this made them more or less likely to be the criminal.

Eventually, I had secured enough interviews and evidence to make an accusation, and I was right! Hooray computer detective, we did it! This was the point where the game dropped out of hyperspace. Now with clearer eyes, I noticed the game professed 11 endings. 11 endings, surely that doesn’t mean…?

So I played a second time. This time, notwithstanding the timer’s relentless ticking, I was no longer under the spell. I could skim dialogue I had seen before, was much more efficient at physical evidence gathering, and quickly had my post-hyperspace suspicions verified. I also had deliberately turned my suspicions a different direction. SERIOUS spoilers from here. Turns out, (Spoiler - click to show)this is kind of mystery where no matter WHO you accuse, you are right. I just don’t know about that. It is kind of a betrayal, no? What seemed a tense web of testimony and evidence didn’t really need untangling, EVERY thread was (Spoiler - click to show)the ‘right’ one. Even exculpatory evidence could be spun to damning with seemingly no drag on the proceedings. This wholly transformed the experience from a kind of clever mystery-solving jam to a facts-don’t-matter, (Spoiler - click to show)collect-all-the-endings jam. Not only is that NOT what I look for in mysteries, it runs counter to all the frisson that first runthrough had and kind of undermines the glow of that run! For me anyway, collect-the-endings is inadequate compensation for that loss. On one level, I get it. Mysteries always have the ‘problem’ of post-solution replay value. Removing the tension of ‘will I solve it in time?’ is a pretty big impact on the gameplay experience though. For me, too big to justify.

As a rating, where does this leave me? My first playthrough was a white knuckle run of pure, uncut Enagement, there is no denying that. Subsequent playthroughs exposed the illusion in a way that retroactively diminished even the first run. It dropped me out of the hallucinogenic bottle of hyperspace to the cold, clarity of real space. That difference feels like a penalty point.

Played: 10/1/24
Playtime: 1hr, two endings
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaging/Mostly Seamless, penalty point for heel turn replay mechanism
Would Play Again?: No, experience seems complete

Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless

I often like IF collaborations quite a lot – Cragne Manor ranks quite high on my all-time favorites list – but they often present a tradeoff: when you’ve got a bunch of authors bringing just their one or two best ideas to the party, the novelty and energy can be infectious, but at the same time, that diversity can fray at the unity of a piece, reducing the impact that any particular element might have on the work as a whole and cramming in too many diverse themes to fully cohere. That’s why reading the blurb for A Death in Hyperspace made me a bit apprehensive: having ten authors work on a game that only lasts about an hour seems like it could be a recipe for chaos. Once I started playing, I was surprised to find that wasn’t at all the case – this tale of a spaceship’s AI investigating the death of its captain maintains a very consistent tone and approach while putting a novel spin on the sci-fi whodunnit genre. If anything, I actually found myself wishing for a bit more of the aforementioned chaos.

After an introduction establishes the murder and lays out the interface, you’re given a roster of about a dozen crew and passengers and access to the various rooms within you where they may be found, and told how investigation proceeds: encountering each character allows to engage in dialogue with them, including asking standardized questions getting to motive, alibi, and anything suspicious they might have seen; the initial conversation also unlocks a piece of evidence that can be found elsewhere on the ship and which, when found, will enable you to further corroborate or undermine the testimony you get in future conversations. Meanwhile, a somewhat-unintuitive “murder board” interface lets you lay out your assessments of how credible each person’s story is, ultimately allowing you to end the game once you’ve made a critical mass of decisions.

It’s easy to see how the structure of the game was created to support collaboration: it appears that the other authors all came up with a character and were responsible for writing the conversations with them, while the organizer or organizers were responsible for the connective tissue. This organizational scheme does allow the various pieces to be stitched together cleanly, but it does mean that there isn’t as much interaction between them as you might expect: often, I’d be having a potentially-incriminating conversation with one suspect while three others were standing right there, with no acknowledgment of the awkward circumstances. It also slowed down an opening that I already found quite slowly-paced: I felt like I had to read the crew roster before jumping into interrogations in order to understand who I was talking to and what they might say about their fellows, but it appears that the roster entries were written to a common format, which made me feel like I was listening to a dozen people tell me about their DnD characters one after another.

Because the thing is, I mostly found the characters dull. They all have one or two interesting sci-fi-y characteristics – there are a couple different kinds of aliens, there’s a cyborg, someone who’s hallucinating while in the throes of hyperspace madness – but given that the only experience of them the game offers is interrogation by a ship’s computer that’s read too many murder-mysteries, there isn’t much room for details of personality to come through in anything but a schematic way. Several of them are also explicitly designated as minimally-interactive red herrings, too, and given that I had a hard time keeping track of a large cast boasting generally-forgettable names (look, I’m not 12 any longer, I’m not going to be able to remember which one is “Until Tomorrow” vs. “Lament Tynes” vs. “Keen Oculus”; at least there are a couple, like “VX2s-K3r BÆSDF”, that are memorably awful) that meant I spent a lot of time clicking on people, finding they didn’t have anything new or interesting to say, and clicking out.

This sense of lassitude is exacerbated by the way the game encourages lawnmowering. You need to loop through every location at least two or three times, since the pieces of “evidence” aren’t findable until you’ve met the appropriate character, at which point you need to loop back for a follow-up conversation, but it’s worse than that because characters can move around. You can track down specific people through the roster feature, but since that means you might miss evidence, it felt like the game was encouraging me to play it by mechanically running through each location and talking to each character over and over until I’d exhausted the content. The conversational structure is also fairly rigid from one character to the next, with few interesting choices to engage the player: many reduce to either behaving normally and asking direct questions, or indulging your murderino streak and wildly leaping to accuse suspects just to see how they’ll react.

Indeed, investigation isn’t that satisfying either; I can’t tell for sure, but I think this is one of those quantum mysteries where every suspect potentially did it or maybe no one did. There are few hard clues to go on (there’s no sign of foul play on the body, and you automatically decline the doctor’s offer to do an autopsy), with your interrogations mostly turning up shifty backstory elements rather than actual evidence; meanwhile, the connection between the “clues” you find and their impacts often felt abstract to me (one of them was a teddy bear that didn’t seem to have anything to do with anything?) Beyond that, the game’s promise of 11 different endings makes it seem likely that they’re all like the one I saw, which constructed a plausible-seeming case for why the suspect I picked might have done it – unfortunately, because the game’s save feature isn’t included in the sidebar but rather nested underneath a game menu link that I didn’t think to return to after toggling some initial settings, I didn’t make a save allowing me to test this theory, though regardless it does seem like at least one ending requires you to do a full replay of the game.

For all this griping, there were a few specific elements I definitely thought worked; the one character who had a sense of humor was actually quite funny to me (though I’m not sure it was a great idea to have the single Black person in the cast speak with an accent called out with nonstandard spelling and punctuation). Pearl, the ship’s AI, is also appealingly keen to find the captain’s killer. If the game had provided characters whose voices similarly took up more space, and loosened up its structure to allow for deeper subplots or more involved investigative tracks, it would probably have made A Death in Hyperspace a woolier, more awkward beast – but one that I think I would have liked far more than the overly-sterile version that we got.

First things first: when you play this game, turn off the time limit. For me, playing with a real-time counter on the screen turned my interaction with A Death in Hyperspace into an experience that was harrowing in all the wrong ways. And the game really doesn't need it.

With that out of the way, let's get to the review. This game was written by many authors, but it's not particularly large. In fact, each of the authors wrote a single character. This makes sense, because A Death in Hyperspace is a murder mystery in (what at first sight appears to be) a classic vein, and a murder mystery needs a lot characters -- as suspects. There's no good whodunnit without a large number of whos that might have dun it. And so it's your job as the space ship's AI to find out where the characters are, collect two clues about each of them, and then decide which of them to accuse.

Interestingly, there (Spoiler - click to show)doesn't seem to be any truth to be found; or rather, whomever you choose to accuse, it will always be presented as the right person. It feels a little more canonical to decide that the captain died from natural causes, in part because it's asymmetric compared to the other endings, and in part because you only unlock it on your second playthrough. Otherwise, though, anything goes. That's fine. The traditional murder mystery where all is revealed at the end is way too comforting; it's good to shake things up once in a while, and this is a way of shaking things up that requires the medium of interactive fiction, so it's a good fit. More could have been done with the moral implications of the baseless accusations that we indulge in in most endings, but I guess the authors wanted to keep things light-hearted.

Gameplay is not entirely successful. On the one hand, the game wants you to play more than once. On the other, it quickly turns into an exercise in finding two clues per character, accusing them, and collecting another ending for your trophy case.

What is most interesting about the piece is the experience of playing this obviously naive AI whose reading of murder mysteries completely structures the way they see the situation. It’s like Northanger Abbey, except mystery instead of romance. There is something fairly hilarious about the inane questions and accusations that form most of one’s dialogue options. Underneath the somewhat mechanical mystery, there is a poignant little comedy playing out, where the player character is too blinded by grief and excitement to see the plain truth: (Spoiler - click to show)that the captain died of natural causes. That is ultimately the point of the game.