Secret of the Black Walrus

(This review is based on the Spring Thing 2023 version.)

Once again, Scotland Yard is baffled and comes knocking on your door for assistance. A locked-door murder mystery! Nice to have something to sharpen your sleuthing mind on.

The Victorian-pastiche writing force runs deep with this one, mostly in a good way. Even when it goes a bit overboard sometimes (thesaurus anyone?), it still bundles the player in a nice and comforting hearthfire detective mood. (Pipe optional.)

Despite the captivating writing however, I felt like this game could be a pitch for a rather predictable detective movie implemented in HTML/Javascript. All the twists and turns of the story are there, as well as the characters and their relations, but they’re only sketchily filled out.

There is definitely something bubbling beneath the surface with regards to the relation between the witty detective and the grumpy Scotland Yard Inspector, but it never gets deeper than the exchange of funny witticisms and insulting remarks.
I had hoped to see a bit more of Detective Sergeant Bixby’s personality. A few links seem to suggest more personal questions, but these are quickly deflected.

The game-information warns the player to take careful notes, lest the game become unwinnable. In the end though, I didn’t feel I (the player) had done much sleuthing and deducing at all. When looking over my notes, I realise that all the clues I needed would fit on the back of a small grocery list (“eggs, milk, ham, alligator dental floss”). A concise walkthrough would consist of . Instead of the result of my deductive skill, this seemed more like having to prove to the game that I had read the previous paragraphs.

The investigation of the crime scene and the interrogation of the witnesses is fun, but the actual detective work of putting the clues together into a coherent whole is done by the game. My little grey cells felt a bit disregarded.

Still, an entertaining detective story.

This game uses a custom Javascript system that is similar to Twine or Choicescript in that you click from a variety of buttons to progress the story. It is optimized for mobile, and worked great on Desktop for me. The delay between clicks was just a little too long for my taste, but that was my only complaint.

You are presented as Madame Soo, a Chinese woman who is also a detective. In a classic locked room mystery, you find a man who has been strangled and have to figure out how it happened.

Overall, the writing was descriptive and the characters were fairly vivid.

With interactivity, the main mechanism for progression is to type in the name of an address you want to visit. There doesn't seem to be any way to go back, so its vital that you write down all names and locations as you go.

The clues themselves and all the deductions outside of the names are done by the character in-story. I would have liked to have had more involvement in that deduction, although I know that's a tricky thing to do in a game.

Others have mentioned the presentation of racism in the game. For me, I found it contributed more to being obnoxious than to providing key historical context.

Overall, I'm impressed by the architecture and writing of this game. My quibbles are mainly with the interactivity level and being drawn out of the game emotionally by the depictions mentioned above.

Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review

Played: 4/19/23
Playtime: 25min

A lifetime ago, I began my fascination with the pulp magazines of the 30s and 40s, and to a lesser extent the dime novels and serials of the 00’s and 10’s (the last ones). Of course Sherlock Holmes played in that space, he practically loomed over it. There are a lot of qualified charms to those stories that still appeal to me. Not the least of which is the purple prose that was a hallmark of so much of it, at least until John D MacDonald and his peers entered the scene.

In a handful of reviews, I have complained about what I called ‘poetic verse.’ I have NOT called it Purple Prose. This is deliberate on my part. While the majority of the world may not see a difference between the two I very much do, no doubt due to my formative fascination with pre-war low culture. My personal distinction between Overwrought Poetry and Purple Prose is that I really like the latter in an only semi-ironic way, while the former pushes me away. What’s the difference? I couldn’t really articulate a grammatical definition, but in application it seems to be one of stakes. If you scale a mountain to leap for the heart of a universal truth… and then fall short it is heartbreaking and hubris-revealing. If you bend over with dramatic flourish to brush lint off your shoes and stumble, that’s kind of funny. The contrast of high language and low stakes is near irresistible.

Secret of the Black Walrus feeds that beast. It apes the tropes and the vibe of Victorian mystery stories in creating an Asian super sleuth, then aiming her squarely at a locked room murder. The language does a lot to settle us in with bangers like:

"the freshest in our bloodthirsty city’s contemptible compendium of heinous crime."
"Bixby had a mind like a lightless cellar."

among others. If anything, I wanted MORE of that! No, it’s not realistic dialogue. Yes it goes out of its way to make its point. That IS the point! That overwrought energy is as much a hallmark of the genre as the Deerstalker hat. I fist pumped in delight whenever it showed up, and was sad when too many screens went by without. Shout out to the pastiche language of the thing in general. Even when too restrained for my taste it ably carried the vibe of its inspiration.

The mystery itself is nicely fit to its conceit, plenty of a->b clue following and twists and peril. It’s not particularly revolutionary but is a nice representation. Mysteries are tough in IF, particularly when your protagonist is a superhuman detective and the player is very much not. Walrus takes the tack of letting you point the protag in an investigative direction, but then letting her do the heavy deductive lifting. Nothing wrong with that, but in providing limited options that can be exhaustively selected it can take on the feel of a wind up toy. Yes, I periodically give it a twist, but all the motive energy is its own doing. I’m not saying I know a better way to do it, I’m saying these kinds of characters are uniquely challenging in IF (see also Lady Thalia).

I wish that those were my only lingering impressions of the work, but there is another heavier impression I carry. Pre-war pulps were deeply racist. There is an entire sub-genre called “Yellow Peril.” When I first engaged these stories, fandom approached this artifact as “awful of course, and kind of quaint in its ignorant hate.” That take itself has not aged well, and my (and society’s) tolerance has shifted significantly. There is an impulse when doing pastiches of pulp stories to underline the racism, as a way to show you are not blind to the faults of the form. This comment comes not from a place of condescending judgement, but of lived experience. I wrote some pulp pastiches decades ago that have aged REALLY BADLY. (I took it even further than Walrus. In a pre-post-satire world I thought the perfect takedown was to exaggerate for satirical effect, to drive home how awful it was. When all I was doing was creating more of it in the world. What was I even doing wading into that anyway? Was my big insight “Hey guys. Hey guys. Racism is BAD ACTUALLY.”??)

Thankfully, Walrus didn’t follow me down that ruinous path, but it did belligerently embrace the ‘don’t forget the racism’ impulse. At this point in my life, I am pretty convinced that just starkly OBSERVING racism (or sexism or sexual abuse or any number of awful things), without having anything to say ABOUT them weighs a work down. Especially when looking back from a different (and hopefully better) cultural context. If the narrative is a light lark meant to thrill or amuse, it is particularly defeating. I think there are defter ways make the protagonist uncomfortable that don’t unintentionally make the reader uncomfortable. Some complain about “woke culture” ahistorical racial diversity and acceptance in fiction like say Bridgerton. Those snowflake whiners somehow don’t care that the practical effect of what they champion is that wish fulfillment fantasy becomes only pleasant to the historically privileged. What are they defending here, the ongoing right to exclude people from WISH FULFILLMENT FANTASY??? If you’re not making historical documentary or pointed polemic, let everyone play! I am swayed by the idea that realistic racism has no place in a light, high society romance.

I am kinda done with “historically accurate racism” in pulpy detective adventures is what I’m saying. Didn’t mean to take this all out on you Walrus, but you stirred up some Stuff for me. I guess its good to know I can get spirited over things other than cats, broccoli and python.

Spice Girl: Ginger Spice
Vibe: Victorian Whodunit
Polish: Smooth
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! If it were mine, I would cut out most or all of the racial stuff, and replace it with MOAR PURPLE PROSE!!!1!!1!!

Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.