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Less brutal than advertised, December 6, 2020Friends, I will level with you: 2020 has been tough for me, and going into this one I wasn’t sure how I felt about another game about murder, especially one that puts the “brutal” right there in the title. Like, I love the Comp for exposing me to things outside my comfort zone and that I never would have found otherwise, but I also come to IF by way of what we used to call adventure games, text or otherwise. Say what you will about Dr. Ego being a bit wonky and not very innovative, but it had me give a banana to a monkey. Now that’s a proper adventure game puzzle: GIVE BANANA TO MONKEY. Not a severed carotid or trace of seminal discharge in sight.
Blessedly, Brutal Murder is – not actually that brutal? Partially this is the tone, which is miles away from the dour proceduralism the title might evoke. If anything it’s a bit chatty, with a narrative voice that directly addresses the player, alternately confessional and urging the player onwards. And while the central crime is like, clearly a murder and is bad, it’s nowhere near as awful, or as awfully described, as what’s on network TV every night (there is one somewhat disturbing plot element that possibly does deserve a content warning, though I’ll spoiler-block it just in case: (Spoiler - click to show)the narrator, an adult tutor who’s in prison for the murder of the eponymous 17-year old, was in a sexual relationship with her that he describes as consensual).
While this came as a relief to me, I do think BMoJL suffers a bit from this tonal unevenness – the subject matter is clearly meant to evoke tragedy, and that mood is stated as text repeatedly, but it’s hard for that sentiment to land given the often-breezy narrative voice, as well as some out-of-context surrealistic flourishes. The game opens with a tutorial sequence, complete with the narrative voice telling you to TAKE KEY and OPEN DOOR, which is completely diegetic and in continuity with the meat of the game. Each chunk of investigation is interspersed with a trip to a black void, and the topography of the map changes in unphysical ways as the story progresses. It’s not too hard to suss out the reason for this, reading between the lines of some of the narrator’s comments (Spoiler - click to show)(the player character appears to be a sort of crime-solving AI trawling through the narrator’s memories) but this doesn’t seem well-integrated with the main thrust of the plot, and felt very underdeveloped.
As to the game itself, it’s got a pretty solid implementation. There’s typically a good amount of scenery, some of which isn’t described, but all of the objects one can interact with are broken out on their own line, which is a shorthand that adds some convenience. I was stymied by how to open the storage-room cabinet for a long time, even after I knew the code, since TYPE and TOUCH and OPEN and UNLOCK and all their variants failed, but the HELP text had told me that USE item was an important verb, so it’s on me for overlooking that. I did run into one significant bug: my first trip to limbo never ended, leaving me wandering a black void forever, which prompted a restart (second time after a half-dozen turns of flailing, I was moved on to the next sequence as intended).
The puzzles are relatively straightforward and don’t require off-the-wall thinking, but there’s never a time when you feel like you’re solving a mystery – instead you’re hunting for the one piece of evidence or reading material that will prompt the narrator to understand things a little better and explain his progress to you. There are no suspects to interview, or deductions to piece together, just cabinets to unlock and journals to read. It sometimes feels as though the player’s just fiddling about with some busywork while the game solves itself.
This is a shame, because the core story of the game is I think pretty good, with some solid character dynamics, an interesting twist (albeit one that could have probably used more groundwork-laying), and well-observed details on the experience of being Asian-Canadian in one particular place and one particular time. But these tonal issues, and the feeling of disengagement brought on by the gameplay/story disconnect, meant it didn’t land for me as strongly as I would have liked.