The Case of the Solitary Resident

I only played this game a couple of days ago, but it was an enjoyable way to spend an hour or so.

You're a detective investigating a (Spoiler - click to show)possibly suspicious death of a little old lady who lives alone and loves plants. There's no real gore in the game per se, but the description of the body is pretty realistic. Actually, all of the technical information in this game appears to be authentic (and despite the obligatory disclaimer that the author put in, I do feel compelled to note that I was very impressed with the research done into the medications since I'm in the healthcare field myself). There's also a pretty yummy-sounding recipe that I'd like to try out sometime soon. Overall, as I stated, the technical and forensic parts of the game shine through nicely, and I'm willing to suspend my disbelief at having results of analyses done so quickly (and the game explicitly refers to this with a message that had me smiling inside).

Where it falls away a bit is in the interactions with persons of interest/suspects. While the usual questions were all there, that part of the game lacked some personality. It felt as if I was running through a checklist, rather than actually interviewing people and gathering information.

There is only one correct solution to the game, which I figured out a while before the end, and which you don't need every single clue in order to achieve. However, the technical aspects of the game made me want to try to get everything I possibly could prior to that - although I did miss one clue somewhere (15/16). A few red herrings/plausible alternatives are sprinkled into the mix, but it shouldn't be TOO difficult to come to the right conclusion and there's no need to go looking up anything outside of the game.

Gameplay is smooth and streamlined for the most part. Playing on my phone was probably not the most ideal of choices, but it didn't hamper the interface too much. Looking back at it on my laptop for the purpose of this review, a bigger screen is definitely recommended but not a necessity. The presentation is neat and having the sidebar for your case file is well-implemented.

One annoying thing was that for some of the research you have to be in a certain location, as that's where the resources for that research are located. That was slightly annoying, but it's not a deal-breaker. Another (slightly less) annoying nitpick is that at times the game won't really advance until you've done practically everything you can do. It's more helpful to think of the game like one of those old point-and-click games from the 80s and 90s. Examine and interact with EVERYTHING, and if you have a choice to do something, might as well go ahead and do it. It makes things somewhat linear in that aspect, but again, I don't really think that's a terribly bad thing.

Overall I did have fun with this game, and I'd definitely recommend playing it if you're into police procedurals or CSI stuff. Not too difficult, and the only real choice you have to make comes at the end. But it's about the journey, not the destination, and for the most part I enjoyed that journey. Some tightening of the interactions, and I'd love to see a sequel to this one.

This Twine game is intended to simulate a forensics-focused whodunnit.

You play as a detective investigating a woman who has been found dead in her apartment after several days. You have the opportunity to take hair, blood, and print samples, analyse medication, interview others, retrieve info from a smartphone, etc.

You yourself are nobody, a cipher, while the suspects are primarily interesting in the information they give rather than their unique characteristics.

There is a lot of technical info in this game, and a ton of links to methodically click through. It has the same kind of puzzle structure as in Toby's Nose, where you read all the info, come to the conclusion, and guess the suspect off a list.

I guessed the suspect wrong but had the cause of death right. It was a fun cerebral exercise, and I would play another game like this. If there were any room for improvement, it might be in making the characters have more unique and interesting features and personalities.

So this is a slightly strained parallel, maybe, but you know Evil Dead 2? The title makes it sound like a sequel, but actually it’s more of a remake, taking the same basic ingredients from the first movie (cabin in the woods, Necronomicon, first-person POV zombies, Bruce Campbell) and redeploying them with significantly higher production values. It’s the same story with The Case of the Solitary Resident, which is recognizably of a piece with Last Vestiges, the author’s IF Comp entry from last year, sharing a locked-door-murder premise and a focus on forensic deduction while moving to Twine, incorporating visuals, and better communicating its expectations to the player. While even in its more accessible form this gameplay paradigm is still a bit dry, the end result is a satisfying intellectual puzzle.

I sometimes struggled with Last Vestiges because it looked like a more conventional mystery than it wound up being – in particular, there were a series of standard adventure-game logic puzzles that gated progression, which made it seem like solving those would likewise solve the mystery. However, that just provided the raw clues; actually understanding what happened also required bringing medical knowledge to bear, and while a police-inspector NPC was on hand to provide some of that information, their expertise wasn’t clearly telegraphed, and accessing that information was made challenging by the open-ended parser interface. Solitary Resident improves in both areas, eliminating the out-of-context game-y elements to focus on its core competencies, while using the affordances of its choice-based interface to make clear what kind of data you need to gather and how you can get it analyzed.

The real strength here is the high level of detail; you can search for blood, hair, and fingerprints in each room of the victim’s apartment, as it becomes clear that poison may have had something to do with her demise, you’ve got lots of tools to come to grips with what’s happened, including sending samples off to the crime lab and two different keyword-driven reference manuals. Beyond that, you can also get formal statements from half a dozen or so suspects, and then question them to push on key elements of their stories (this is the one place where the otherwise-smooth interface falters – I was stymied for a bit after launching my first interview since I didn’t realize that I could go back for Q+A after reading the initial statement). Chasing down every single lead requires paying close attention to everything you’ve learned, and a few use text-box input to make sure you can’t just lawnmower your way to victory – I felt very satisfied when the game told me I’d found all 16 clues after finishing the game and aced the multiple-choice test where you lay out your theory of the case, since I’d had to use my noodle to get there.

My only real critique is that the forensic side of things feels like it far overwhelms the personal elements of investigation. The suspect interviews are much more straightforward than the evidence-gathering gameplay, and none of the characters – the victim very much included – never threaten to feel like real people. That perhaps fits the author’s design goals (the game is tagged as “educational”, and a few references within it suggest that it’s at least partially intended as a more-engaging experiential-learning alternative to textbooks), but does feel like something of a missed opportunity – a few more colorful characters to liven things up wouldn’t undermine the pedagogical possibilities, I don’t think. This head-down approach to detective-work also winds up making the solution to the locked-door mystery easier to guess: (Spoiler - click to show)when the thinly-sketched suspects are a son who needs money but clearly could have just asked for it rather than tried to hurry his inheritance, an old business associate who had a moderately-intense falling-out with the victim a decade ago, a neighbor who has no conceivable motive whatsoever, another neighbor who had a strained relationship with the victim since she was annoyed by his smoking habit, and a near-comatose ex-husband, it doesn’t take too many little gray cells to realize this was an accident and not murder.

If there’s a third game in the sequence, I think I’d enjoy it more if it paid more attention to the personalities involved and created as much suspense around the question of who did the killing, as around how it was accomplished. A full-comedy installment a la the third Evil Dead movie, Army of Darkness, is probably not needed here, though – the authors have cracked their formula and there’s plenty of room to keep playing with it.

Adapted from a SpringThing24 Review

Played: 4/3/24
Playtime: 1hr, 14/16 clues, right cause of death, wrong drug

If I part the opaque mists of time, push back untold eons to my reentry to this hobby, reaching, reaching nearly two entire trips around the sun to the barely discernible epoch of Fall 2022… this authorspace was virgin snow to me. Every game came as single line on a blank slate - no context of author idiosyncrasies, platform biases, tell-tale prose and fascinations. Just the raw work itself. Ah, such a simple, untarnished time and state for a reviewer full of unearned confidence and bluster.

An interminable 18 months later finds the withered, corrupted husk before you: penetrating brilliance and revelatory insights dimmed and drowned beneath a cacophony of prior art and superficial connections. You require evidence of my tragic artistic collapse? Not even past the cover page of this game, the eureka that pushed all other thoughts from my head was “Oooh! Oooh! I know this!” For a mad minute, I thought it could even be a Twine reimplementation of that former parser effort.

As final, damning evidence of my intellectual bankruptcy let me now proceed to review this work, liberally comparing it to its predecessor.

IT IS BETTER IN EVERY WAY.

The Twine platform is used to great effect in this work - its game-pane setup, liberal use of mood-setting graphics, case file/interview subscreens, and even text organization all combine to immediately cast the player in role of no-nonsense, just-the-facts-ma’am detective. The Twine command paradigm of selecting highlighted links on the page provide a superior framework where links only allow actions that support the investigation, as opposed to a parser’s need to accommodate any number of mimesis-breaking player fumblings.

The mystery is very capably put together - enough red herrings and dead ends to make searching out truths fun and challenging, not too many to drown the player. Many different items and leads that branch and intersect in interesting ways. Even the flourishes like timed text are used to advantage that could easily be intrusive.

The author uses all these tools to push the player into the role of Forensic Detective, then opens the door on clinical test results, chemical names and lateral thinking. My biggest beef with the previous game was that it didn’t sufficiently show its stripes, and let the player muck about with parser puzzle toys instead. It wanted Quincy, but let you be Clouseau. This time, the player is aligned from the jump - get that Keystone Cops nonsense outta here, pros are at work! The work is better focused, and better showcases its strengths, for it.

I really had fun with this one. In the end, I drew satisfaction from legitimate deduction and clue connection to determine cause of death. I failed however to identify the chemical source of the problem. I did miss two clues somewhere, perhaps those held the final piece I needed. OR PERHAPS NOT. Because the first thing I did after informed of my failure was Google search some chemicals, and ON THE FIRST RESULTS PAGE, THE MYSTERY WAS SOLVED.

I COULDA USED GOOGLE TO HELP SOLVE THE MYSTERY ALL ALONG! God, I love that so much. This thing made me a detective and with just one more bit of extra-game lateral thinking I might have closed the case. LIKE A REAL DETECTIVE. I can’t remember a failure so satisfying, and the credit goes to the real-world, clinical vibe the game created through graphic layout, mystery construction and tight UI control.

I kinda can’t wait for the next one in the series. You better BELIEVE I will be testing if it measures up to this one. [spoiler aside to author - that said, there is a discernible pattern in these two works that casts a shadow… beware!]

Mystery, Inc: Velma
Vibe: Forensic Detective
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel! : If it were my project, only one tweak: the body’s apparent sex is left unrevealed when examined, leading to a strange few minutes of disconnect when finding female name references around the apartment. Yes, it can be deduced but doesn’t feel like that detail should need to be.

Having enjoyed the author’s *Last Vestiges* in last year’s IF Comp, I was happy to see another mystery game from them! This one is done in Twine rather than Inform, which allowed for some nice features, like a “case file” page documenting the evidence you’ve collected and pop-up notifications letting you know when analysis results are ready. The latter was a nice way of making it feel like time was passing in the game world and of ensuring that not too much information was dispensed at once.

Some aspects of the UI didn’t work as well for me; once I had all the analysis results, that section of the case file became overwhelming, so I would have liked to see it divided up somehow (whether with subsections or perhaps a sub-page). I also didn’t feel that the stock images representing the different locations and actions added much, as they were too generic to provide meaningful flavor.

Writing-wise, the tone was a bit odd, with the PC making some unjustified assumptions early on ((Spoiler - click to show)really, we never have any reason to suspect there was foul play), which didn’t fit with the otherwise realistic nature of the game. In contrast, the NPC dialogue was rather flat, and I wished there had been more depth to the interview segments (at least with the deceased’s son).

As far as gameplay, investigating the apartment felt somewhat lawnmower-y, and I would have liked if visited and unvisited links were distinguished with different colors. Seeking out evidence does get more complex later on, though, as new information opens new avenues of questioning and there are things you have to look up via keywords. The most fun part to me was once I had all the evidence and could start constructing a theory about what happened. Reviewing the various pieces of evidence and making connections between them made me feel like I really was solving a mystery. And when I saw how granular the game wanted me to be in describing my conclusions, I went over it all again before committing, because I was really invested in getting it right—and it was very satisfying when I did!