Le chaudron d’Anaritium is an interactive mystery made in Open Adventure (the author and system is one), set in a Gaul village at the dusk of a dreary winter. You play as Isara, a bard-in-training tasked to find a missing artefact before the gods turn on the village. Will you find the artefact and its thief? and figure out the why and the how?
On the Open Adventure platform, you are introduced to the mystery at hand, and the different paths you can investigate, whether it be visiting locations or talking to other characters. As you find more clues, new paths may be open to you. Along with two large maps, some paths are also illustrated, in a watercoloured comic-style.
Every path taken is listed one below the other, in a way that you can re-read them with ease. The engine also lets you know when you’ve already visited a section, and only puts forward on the main page the most interesting location for you to visit.
The prose is quite lovely as well, bringing to life an atmospheric setting, filled with mysticism and legends.
And when you believe you’ve solved the mystery, you can fill in your answers to the different questions in a text box, before how correct you were and get the epilogue. But, because of how the game is set up, you’ll never truly be wrong at the end. The website collects the answer and gives you the solution right away, regardless of how close you were to the truth. So while the mystery was interesting, and fairly simple to figure out, I wished there would be a bit of a consequence to who you accuse of the crime or explain how you think things happened.