A Death in Hyperspace

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.