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Didn't Think a Mystery Could Make Me Mad, January 4, 2024Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
Buckle up, this one fired me up a bit
This is a murder mystery. A barista protagonist survives a car crash to find her signature figured into a string of doomed deliverymen, and she is the prime suspect! Relive the previous days to see if you can successfully finger the perpetrator. It is a fairly limited-choice work, more fiction than interactive until the final j’accuse.
I would say up until the final choice, the work has two defining features: 1) very attractive, cartoony artwork, and 2) offputtingly intrusive prose. Word choice is routinely awkward, to the point I stopped grabbing examples after a while. I am not exaggerating when I say every other text box elicited a grimace of “phrasing, please!” “Jackie’s shoulders stricken immediately,” “Until close! No butts!” (wrong kind of ‘but’), a selectable “Group Handle” which to this day I have no idea what it is even after grabbing it. It appears to have had a good supply of play testers, I hope this is not a case of A@%#ole American Reviewer coming down on translation gaps. Best I can say is regardless of source it was endlessly distracting. It is also nowhere near the most infuriating thing about this work.
The character work is pretty light, but when it is applied, everyone feels kind of selfish excepting maybe the college student. A conversation with her best friend about the protagonist’s boss: “I am running the shop this week. Maggie’s on vacation.” “Again??" Casey groans, “That whore. […]” MeYOW, Casey.
The protagonist herself is maybe the worst at this. Her response choices seem to vary between “petty” and “rude” with the occasional “begrudgingly doing her job.” It makes her unsympathetic and kind of a drag to spend all our time with, and something I rebelled against whenever choice opportunities presented themselves. While maybe this is narratively justified… I’ll get there. For sure in the moment it is offputting. Given no alternative, we work with her through four increasingly tense nights as a stalker seems to haunt the perimeter, then suffer a car crash, and hit endgame.
So, who is the killer? As a mystery I would say, drily, it is not very tight. While there are a lot of events that happen, the game goes to lengths to show that any of the suspects might plausibly have a hand in them, or at least can’t be ruled out. When asked to finger a suspect, I went with one whose actions had the least plausibly innocent explanations. Initially it seemed like I was maybe right, or at least in the ballpark? This was far from any kind of smoking gun, btw, but, yay me? Murder motive, a linked robbery, mechanics of the crash, none of those made sense for ANY of the suspects including the guilty party. I could easily have washed my hands at this point, assuming I had ‘solved’ a kind of unsatisfyingly constructed mystery. It was a Mechanical, Notably glitchy prose experience, until I tried to restart from a save game. There seemed to be a bug in the web-play implementation where the savegame was not found and I got error messages, pushing it to Intrusive.
So I replayed from start, laboriously retracing the entire game just to see what happened. I made some different choices that resulted in new incidental text but no new information, and landed again on the “who do we accuse?” And chose someone different. Holy s@#$. Okay, here is the I-promise-its-relevant suspect list: spoilers I guess? (Spoiler - click to show)an African American student, an undervalued Hispanic receptionist, an Asian immigrant, and a spoiled rich White Girl. I reiterate, at this point, I had no convincing clues of ANYONE’S guilt. Instead of my initial guess, I kind of randomly fingered the (Spoiler - click to show)African American student. Not only was I wrong this time (as expected), I unintentionally caused a POC to be gunned down by Police! WTF GAME?!?!?! Is this the game I was playing all along? There is no way I was going to subject other suspects to alternate endings at that point, so I reran again, and this time accused (Spoiler - click to show)no one giving me a reveal that (Spoiler - click to show)I WASN’T EVEN WHO I THOUGHT I WAS???
Quick recap: Blind guess #1: “correct.” Blind guess #2: SO SO VERY WRONG. #3: The “real” ending I guess? (Assuming for a moment this ending made a lick of sense, which it very much does not.) How do I parse this? In a traditional fiction narrative, this would fall apart under the weight of its own contradictions, but it might not be actively offensive. As an IF work though? The game has specifically put us into a mystery solving role. The player is both invested and complicit in getting it ‘right’. With the first solution, you are convinced ‘yeah I got!’ by uncertainly pointing the blame finger and through no active agency or knowledge, seeming to serve justice. That EXACT SAME process, pointed elsewhere led to atrocity. If I hadn’t taken the third path, what would this be saying? Certainly it is saying racial profiling is bad, I get that. Why did it “reward” me for a guess then? Is it saying, God forbid, to serve Justice you sometimes just have to GUESS?? Does it actually make a difference WHO you point an unsure finger at? SHOULD IT??? What clue did I have, other than some time remaining in IFCOMP judging period, that I should keep playing, that this WASN’T the message of the piece?
When you add in the possible third ending, “WHY IS THE GAME EVEN RAISING THESE KINDS OF QUESTIONS AT ALL WHEN IT ISN’T TRYING TO ENGAGE THEM?” As a player, I was complicit in ALL the endings, why is the game sucker punching me, then moving on like its shoddy construction had no role in this?
So let’s engage that third ending. (Spoiler - click to show)If you accuse no one, it is revealed you are actually the murderer, stealing the identity OF THE PERSON YOU FRAMED FOR THE MURDERS. Like, murderer? Literally steal ANYONE ELSE’S IDENTITY but the person you PERSONALLY have ensured the police will scrutinize most closely! And you only learn this because you REFUSED to give the police another angle to pursue, NOT EVEN YOUR OLD IDENTITY, which maybe should have been plan A in this branch!? Nevermind the whole thing coming down when the stolen identity’s COP FATHER swung by to check in. It doesn’t work at all on its own. In some sense the whole piece would at least be more coherent if this ending DIDN’T seem to work, if the police noticed the same inconsistencies and the murderer ended up being too deranged to put together a coherent plan.
Had it done that, it might have retroactively recast the other endings as ‘oh snap, murderer actually got away with plan!’ Or maybe been a slightly more coherent scheme if #1 and #3 were combined. There’s still plenty of gaps for sure, but maybe get at least a slight charge before it crumbled on closer inspection? What gets me is, this thing put me on a journey of player complicity that was deeply uncomfortable. If it had followed through on this in any way, had something to say about it, maybe it would be justified? But in service of AND SUBORDINATE TO a clumsily executed shock twist, it is clear all that turmoil was not the point of the piece, may have even been accidental. That made it kind of offensive. At best, I found it thematically unfocused and deeply illogical. At worst actively Bouncy.
Played: 10/29/23
Playtime: 45min, 3 endings
Artistic/Technical ratings: Bouncy, Intrusive restore bug, language
Would Play After Comp?: No, do not poke the bear. Twice, I mean.
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless