Deceit in the Guildhall of Virtue

Ironically, while playing this mystery game about putting clues together, I had two moments of clarity where I thought 'ha, this reminds me of ____' and then put two and two together.

The first (which should have been obvious) was that I thought, 'man, this interface really reminds me of Paintball Wizard', which lead me to look up and realize that Doug Egan made Paintball Wizard.

The second moment was that I was enjoying the clue linking thing and thought, 'Ha! I used that for my game Color the Truth, and Erstwhile used it to. I'm glad to see someone else had the same idea.' Then after I beat the game, I saw in the credits that the author was originally planning on using the Color the Truth system before settling on Twine. I think the game is better for the Twine version; the menus and quick navigation significantly improved my experience.

This game is a goofy cartoonish comic hero mystery game with distinct characters and solid dialog. You play as a brain on a skateboard with no real way of interacting with the world. The leader of your superhero band, Captain Prodigious, has died, and you have to figure out who killed him.

Gameplay has 3 main systems. The first is talking to people, which gives clues. You can say those clues to every suspect, and can combine them to get better clues. The second is gaining more physical capabilities, such as pushing, taking, and getting keycards. The third is using those capabilities to obtain physical evidence.

Some clues cannot be used in normal conversation, but are saved up for a big 'in the parlor' type meeting where you finally explain things to everyone. There, you pair up clues again.

I was worried that I'd be put off by the goofiness of the game (which continues throughout), but it's good-natured fun and it has serious undertones that were meaningful, like the desire for young adults to be treated with respect and the difficulties that married couples have in spending time with each other, or the way that disabled people can be neglected.

Like many of these clue-matching games, the midgame was the hardest, when you have the most unmatched clues and knowing what to do next is hard. I used one hint at the time. Other than that, the game did a great job of managing the quadratic clue-matching space by hinting at things like 'oh, this conversation topic was almost enough, you need more to convince this person' or 'you should try this with someone else'.

The game felt substantial. It felt more approachable to me than Paintball Wizard was. It does have a few rough edges; I think I remember someone mentioning that waiting for people to leave a room or be together was hard, but someone else pointed out that you can wait in the foyer, and I used that and it was great (until it disappeared near the very end before the summative thing, but by then I didn't need it anymore). Actually, that's the only real rough edge I had.

I'm really interested to see how this places. I love mysteries, and the good features in this game mean I wouldn't be surprised to see this in the top 5. However, I don't know how people will react to the interface and the goofy superhero genre, so I could see it placing somewhere else in the top 20. But I personally hope it gets higher than paintball wizard did! (which was 13th). I've played a lot of fun games this comp already, though, so I guess it's not overall placement that matters, but quality of game, and I think this game is really high quality.