A Death in Hyperspace

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.