Hauntless

Not marking any spoilers because, given the nature of the game, it's not really possible to spoil the solution!

This one really drew me in; I liked the *Toby's Nose*-esque setup where you can guess the solution to the mystery at any time, but to gain any basis for guessing you first have to thoroughly investigate. I enjoyed checking out the different locations, unlocking more information as I explored, uncovering potential murder weapons, and most of all learning about the deceased circus employees, their backgrounds and their relationships to each other.

So far, so good... but eventually I hit a wall. A massive, impassible wall. I'd been to every location many times; I had taken notes on which bodies I'd found, where I'd found them, and how they'd died. The problem was, there was one body I hadn't found---Vivian's. And without finding her body, I had no way of guessing where or how she had died. I also had no idea who had done it. I'd been able to concretely rule out a few weapons, and... that was it.

I finally came up with some semblance of a theory and guessed. Wrongly. Again, and again. Through brute force, I finally got the answer... and was absolutely baffled, because I hadn't seen anything that would have led me to that conclusion. (I was able to solve the after-puzzle very handily, though, because *that* information I had!)

I now know that the who, how, and where of the murder are all randomized---different players get different solutions, and it seems some of those solutions are discoverable! I really wish I had gotten a different one, because finding the clues and piecing the answer together would have been very satisfying. I can only conclude that either I completely overlooked a description of me finding Vivian's lion-chewed bones in the illusion gallery (I ended up opening the source in Twine to see *how* I was supposed to have gained the knowledge that "lions" was the murder weapon), *or* that the game had a bug and her bones simply didn't exist in my playthrough. I also am not sure if I missed something implicating Casper; I did uncover info related to them, but nothing sufficient to make me believe they murdered Vivian.

As alluded to above, the randomized solution will make players' experiences with this game vary widely. Sadly, for me, it was a game with a lot of promise that ended up falling flat.

Adapted from a SpringThing25 Review

Played: 4/4/25
Playtime: 1.75hr, disgrace

Among the most uncommon experiences I have, here in my modern engagement with IF, is the tremendously enjoyable failure. I don’t mean failure of the game, I mean failure of me, the player. Games I beef so hard they leave welts, yet still look back on fondly. There are two flavors of those, both utterly remarkable for their accomplishments. The first, arguably more subtle, are a cold dose of water, exposing the REASONS for my failure as of a piece with the work’s themes. These games finesse my failure into the artwork itself. The more brute force way is “simply” to present such overwhelmingly enjoyable gameplay, such delightful prose and plotting that even the stink of failure doesn’t diminish my esteem for it. In some ways these are the spiritual Yin to the “It’s Not You, It’s Me” Yang.

I kind of showed you my cards with that intro didn’t I? The game presents a supernatural investigation into a mass killing scenario nearly a hundred years old, to free a ghost from purgatory. Why not? You then spend the game exploring beautifully described and illustrated carnival remnants looking for clues to solve things. Why didn’t police find these clues back then? Eh, who cares? You proceed to wade through old artifacts, notes and journals piecing together the events and characters from that fateful day. It is all so vividly rendered, which is a tribute to the prose. Both the decay around you, and the inner lives of long dead characters are painted so clearly that despite a reasonably large cast all of them feel alive and unique. Honestly, as a novel I would eat it with a spoon.

As a game, the link-select gameplay lets you navigate around the tattered tents, kicking up new clues with each revisit (to a point), all to the purpose of using a Clue-like scorecard to eliminate suspects, weapons and locations to solve a specific murder. Clue seems to have fallen out of favor as a deduction game this century, with so many stronger modern innovations stepping up, but its process-of-elimination bones are solid, especially when grafted to a well written series of vignettes that require player intuition to translate into “elim this one.” Other gameplay nods include tracking your return visits (as a soft pointer to potentially more information), reviewable lists, testimony and artifacts all supporting your ‘can I eliminate anyone/anything/anywhere?’ gameplay. As is my nature I tried to EXHAUST the information available before cycling to endgame. I took copious notes, even creating a spreadsheet to track character interrelations. I was one roll of yarn away from a full on Mind Map.

Along my investigation, there were more technical glitches than could be overlooked. The wonderful illustrations only actually loaded about half the time. More seriously, periodically I would get red bars of doom saying things like: “(mock-visits:) cannot be used outside of debug mode.”,
“A custom macro (with no params) didn’t output any data or hooks using (output:) or (output-data:).” Or other such. I don’t THINK they affected my ability to gather clues, though one appeared when I tried to retrieve a needed key that might have locked me out of something. There was still enough meat to power past those until I exhausted the environs and it was time to put up or shut up.

I did, like a good pro-player, save at this point. Foreshadow.

Here is where I must now discuss and dissect my epic fail. While technically not spoilers as, again, FAILURE, know what you are in for if you continue to read these, let’s call them ANTI-SPOILERS. Here’s the thing. This was a mass murder event, right? Despite what I am going to call too-soft steering that the goal was to solve ONE murder, I assumed, and played as if, solving them all would solve the one. Through that lens, there is no better alibi than ALSO BEING MURDERED. The game made this fun by sometimes identifying bodies, but sometimes requiring you deduce bodies’ identities to eliminate them. At the end I was able to narrow to two potential survivors/suspects. Only one of them had a plausible motive for mass murder (though that was admittedly a HUGE logical jump), so, boom! Suspect identified. Similar logic was applied to weapon: if I found it, it couldn’t be the murder weapon because the murderer clearly must have run off with it. Shut up, my logic is unassailable!

Yeah, the game didn’t think so either. Two strikes right off the bat with my two possibilities. Dafug? Ok, maybe the mass murder theory was blindering me - who remaining had reason to kill the victim even if they were somehow later murdered, unrelated? Strike three. Y’know how in baseball, after strike three you are out? In Hauntless, after strike three you are (Spoiler - click to show)DEAD.

Wow mystery, you have my attention, let me just restore that savegame I foreshadowed earlier and…
“The (dropdown:) macro was given a bind to $saveLoader and the string “guess 1”, but needs 1 more value.”

No restore possible. Well, crap. This left me at a crossroads. Do I really comb through ANOTHER at least hour and a half, retracing every one of my steps to revisit this scenario absent my initial assumptions?

I think I do, but maybe like in a few months when the technical problems have been fixed. I really was engaged deeply in this thing, loving the environment, gameplay and prose. The fact that I got it SO wrong hurt a bit, but hey, I’m resilient. I just don’t think I can give it that much time NOW, and not in its current state. ESPECIALLY without a functioning save-restore. (I was subsequently informed that the opening menu might have successfully allowed a restore, but too late to help me.)

Horror Icon: Jigsaw
Vibe: Supernatural Cluedo
Polish: Rough
Gimme the Wheel! : I mean, if it were my project, fix all those bugs, natch. Starting with that patently cruel RESTORE one.

Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Tragic deaths leave the old circus haunted, but progress marches on so the ghosts must make way for the new owners to develop the plot. Your job is to find and remove any remaining spectral activity.

The best way to send a persistent ghost on its way to the Great Beyond is to make it aware of the circumstances of its death. Since this particular lingering deceased’s ending was of the violent kind, your straightforward approach of scattering a bit of purifying salt and telling the poltergeists to “move along, nothing to see here anymore” will not work. You’re facing a real cold case mystery.

I really like this setup. It offers all the sleuthing opportunities of a murder investigation while providing a look back in time through the eyes of the protagonist. A time when the circus was a place of wonder and awe and that strange mixture of attraction and repulsion caused when entertainment borders on freak-show.

The setting is beautifully realised. The writing and the remarkable drawings give an almost tactile impression of the old derelict circus tents and the shambles that remain of the performance equipment. It was a joy and a thrill wandering through this environment, half-expecting some paranormal activity around every corner. And there is certainly something going on here. Details of the rooms are changed when you revisit them. Some ghost going behind your back, or is it your own inattentiveness the first time through? Either way, Hauntless demands thorough, careful, and ongoing exploration to expose its many layers of clues.

There. See that last word? It’s a clue!
Hauntless is heavily inspired by the board-game Clue (“the butler did it in the library with the golden candelabrum”). During your investigation, it’s your task to sift out any clues, indications, suggestions, as to the possible location, method, and culprit of the murder. (There’s a nifty note-table available where you can indicate your knowledge about these things.) When you’ve investigated the circus and its immediate surroundings to your satisfaction, you should be able to deduce the true account of the crime.

Perhaps it’s my parser-instincts, but while I did enjoy the exploration and investigation very much, it frustrated me at times that I couldn’t actually do a lot of stuff. The example that sticks most in my mind is the corner of a newspaper sticking out from under a cushion. I so wanted to pick it up and read it, it was a detail so temptingly mentioned in the room description, but I couldn’t get at it.
The vast majority of “action” in this game happens in the player’s head, sifting through the text and searching for important information, combining that information to deduce facts and eliminate possibilities. But there is very little active searching for clues.
Everything you need is in the descriptions, and discovering the things that weren’t initially in the descriptions is achieved by walking away and coming back to the same room, where the angry fit of a poltergeist may have blown some important papers into view. If I’d had a parser at my disposal, I would have looked on, under, and behind the furniture the first time.

I extensively used paper and pen to take note of everything’s and everyone’s whereabouts, and finally I did manage to fill in the in-game roster and find the murderer. Maybe it would be a nice touch to have a blank in-game notebook too, where the player can type anything.

I enjoyed walking around this old and rundown circus a lot. The wonderful drawings made my exploration even more engaging. And it was very satisfying to put all the clues together at the end. (After, fortunately I would say, also being wrong the first few times so I did experience the “You Lose! Mwuahahaha!” fail state.) I even stayed after the main investigation to play the epilogue game, where you can tie up some loose threads about the deaths of the other circus performers.

Good game.