Forensic Necromancy: A Murder in Nineveh

Forensic Necromancy: A Murder in Nineveh

This game fits in with the author's other games this comp, being a Dialog game with clickable nouns and verbs and an ASCII map at the top.

In this one, you are an archaeology student checking out a dig at night to do drugs and use necromancy in order to view the mind palaces of dead people.

It tells a semi-historical tale of an emperor of Assyria and his two sons, one strong and one weak, fighting over sucession.

The mind palaces include classic IF puzzles like darkness and opening a locked door without the key (though there's no newspaper here!). Solving these puzzles gives access to new areas which unlocks new memories, which unlock new mind palace items.

The historical setting is interesting, especially as I've Sennacherib pop up in the old testament several times, including Isaiah, which is a highly valued book in my religion (and one of the few books I've done machine learning authorship analysis on, mostly by accident). There he's an external threat and his god is pitted against ours.

That god, Marduk, is referred to frequently here. We visit the temple of Marduk and find a statue.

There's a lot of dialog but not much conversation, if that makes sense. (I always accidentally mispell dialogue when playing these games). There are many cutscenes, but no talking to people. That, combined with the small map and classic puzzles, makes this a game that is fairly simple to get through and hard to fail at (though I was in a rush early on, skipped messages, and ended up not opening the backpack and being very confused for a while).

I could nitpick. The cutscenes being more than a page big and replaying every time you enter a room was somewhat obnoxious. The tutorial was kind of intrusive and big (though obviously ignoring it was a bad move, so that's on me). But neither of these things were big enough to decrease enjoyment. This game had a good concept and executed it well. It's nice to see people write on things they are passionate about, and which teach real-life facts.