The Coffee Cake Caper

Adapted from a SpringThing26 Review

Played: 4/11/26, 4/19/26
Playtime: 1.25hr stalled on first mystery; 45min w/ heavy walkthrough

Some tightly constructed mysteries seem to be written backwards. The author conceives of the crime, then plumbs characters, happenstance, clues and motives to drive towards its solving. Finally, they usher the protagonist through those items in a deliberate way, burying conclusions among red herrings that all make sense in the end. On the one hand, this is good - writing in the other direction could lead to meandering, contradictory and unsatisfying details that undermine the coherency of the puzzle.

It’s also a bit like navigating a trail network backwards. Imagine if you will a motivated hiker starting at a beautiful scenic overlook, the terminus of a particularly rewarding but signage-free trek. MOST hikers will start at the beginning: encountering junction after junction of intricate trail crossings, needing to suss out the ONE path that leads forward. Over and over again, perhaps with some false starts and retracing of steps. Our backwards outdoors enthusiast however, they do NOT experience this. For them, every junction has a SINGLE path backwards, with all the other trails clearly meandering in the wrong direction. For our reverse-pilgrim, the confounding network is anything but, and they speedily and confidently navigate back to the trailhead.

Ok, this metaphor has screaming gaps. Somehow our reverse hiker is also creating the trail system? AND the view at the end? What I am getting at is that, armed with foreknowledge of the mystery’s solution, a mystery author might lose sight of the bafflingly broad possibilities for explorers running it the OTHER WAY. I wouldn’t have spent so much time fumbling with this increasingly over-engineered metaphor if I wasn’t going to apply it to CCC.

For MY hike, I spent over an hour at the very first junction: arguably, the best signposted junction in the game. It wasn’t that the clues weren’t there, some of them anyway, it’s that the clues pointed to more paths than maybe the author acknowledged? After seeking other hikers’ input, I secured the trail map, blazed past that first crossroads, then hit the same artifact again and again. Logical conclusions that made sense BACKWARDS, but FORWARDS were not the only possible path. Ultimately, this repeated artifact meant EVERY STEP was ushered by the walkthrough, not under my own power. This much hand waiving at (if not outright IGNORING of) alternatives could not help but undermine the hike’s reward (and our faith in the deductive powers of the protagonist), regardless of the final vista.

BUT. The work had other charms. For one, despite having consumed a LOT of detective games over the years, the deduction minigame was a thrillingly new mechanic for me. You are presented with 2-4 questions to answer WHY a character might be lying to you. If you successfully navigate the dropdown options, BOOM! you catch the lie and the picture gets clearer. The dropdown was kind of ingenious - it presented facts you had uncovered as options (so many facts!) that both resisted lawnmowering in their breadth, but ALSO triggered you to think about specific aspects that might apply to this suspect/witness. Honestly, it was this mechanism, coupled with the construction of the mystery, that kept me at it, long after I had resigned myself to the walkthrough experience.

The construction of the mystery was ALSO intriguing. It turns out (Spoiler - click to show)EVERYONE is lying to you for all kinds of reasons! Penetrating those details gives you an increasingly clear picture of the sequence of events that notionally lead you closer and closer to the truth, culminating in the biggest lie by the perpetrator themselves. What a revelation of gameplay these two elements created! It felt like a new take on mystery solving that was both thrillingly novel and provided a narratively satisfying scaffolding.

THIS game didn’t quite realize the promise of this architecture for me though. Each junction was fraught with questions that did not parse against their dropdown options, options that encapsulated conclusions in opaque ways, and conclusions that made more sense backwards than forwards. I suppose if the narrative itself had been stronger, or tenser or funnier, that could have bubbled me along. I kept coming back to “Wait, our Thinking Machine organization is prioritizing THIS nearly stakes-free crime?? Are there so few Locked Room mysteries left in the world?” Don’t get me wrong, our protagonist was appealingly humble, the suspect pool diverse and distinct, and the setting confidently painted. But none of that could escape the shadow of the central mystery’s problems.

Ultimately, I am thinking of this as a training hike. I think there is a TERRIFIC game waiting to be trail blazed with this mechanic and construction. Those two choices are an innovative and enticing bedrock to build a game on. I think I just need a bit more attention paid to how it plays FORWARD to realize its promise.

Spaceship: Hermes
Vibe: Hallmark Mysteries
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel! : I think I have made it pretty clear what I would focus on, were it my work? I think the most important takeaway though is that I would DEFINITELY CREATE MORE MYSTERIES WITH THIS TEMPLATE. Given the fictional detective organization established as background, the serial potential is RIGHT THERE.

Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

This is a mystery game, one of my favorite IF genres.

It's a cozy mystery. No murder here--instead, a cake competition is sabotaged when one person's overnight dough goes missing.

You are called in as a professional to investigate what happened.

First, you go through and ask everyone questions, which can be done lawnmower style (i.e. just picking every option). Occasionally something you do in one branch will unlock something in another.

The characters include two long-term competitors, one of whom favors style over substance and always wins, vs a more traditional baker. There are also the competition organizer and the security guard to question, with another person coming in later.

The 'deduction' phase consists of filling in drop-down menus with the crime, the motive, and pieces of evidence.

This is where my experience with the game hit the brakes and sent me running for hints. The possibility space is huge; there are like 20 options in the dropdown menu, which is the same for most options, so there are like (20^5)/6 possibilities to guess from for the right answer (the /6 is because the order of the last 3 don't matter).

So the game would have to have strong clues to make this doable. And I think it could be for the right person or persons; this would be a great game to do as a group. But for me, the clues were often very far back in the game hidden as incidental details. And there are multiple solutions that aren't accepted. For instance, the first thing you can deduce (mid-game spoilers) is (Spoiler - click to show)that the security guard ate some of the cake. You find goop in a paper cup. There is also frosting on their uniform. So you'd think that the crime is he 'ate the frosting' and the evidence is 'paper baking cup'. But actually the crime is 'ate the cake' and the evidence is 'rainbow frosting.' For similar reasons, I had difficulty and basically ran to the solution for the rest of the game.

Does this mean I'm dumb? Yes. Most people play games not that require you to be smart, but make you think you are smart or good or that you learn over the timeframe of the game.

I think someone that takes careful notes and/or plays with others may get a more satisfying end out of this.

I liked the characters and the setting (circus is always fun) and the baking description made me hungry.

My wife is a fan of all things British, and I’m usually happy to go along for the ride, so when she started getting into TV adaptations of UK-set cozy mysteries, I gladly watched them alongside her. I could definitely see the attraction – one of her favorites was set in the Cotswolds and added to its bucolic setting wacky hijinks and endearing side-characters, while ensuring that the murders were handled with discretion and indeed, a hint of whimsy, which kept the quantity of ugly brutality required to set the mechanism of mystery into motion to a minimum (see, you start writing about these things and the twee wordplay is infectious). So it was all a good time, save for one rather large fly in the ointment: none of the aforementioned mysteries made a lick of sense.

See, when I watch a murder mystery, I like to play along and guess at whodunnit (not to mention why and how), and while my hit rate is generally pretty solid, I wound up completely stymied when watching these. Reliably, the investigation in the first three quarters of the show would serve only to chase down red herrings and false leads, the blundering policemen would get in the way just when the detectives were about to figure something out, and pretty much all the cases were “solved” when one of the lead characters inadvertently put themselves into the power of a heretofore-innocuous supporting player who would suddenly reveal an unguessed and unguessable motive that had only benefited from the lightest of foreshadowing in the course of trying to cover their tracks through one final (inevitably foiled) act of violence.

For all my complaining, there’s a method to the madness – a cozy mystery wouldn’t be very cozy if the reader/viewer were tensed up on high alert the whole time, scanning for the scantest clue and obsessively weighing and reweighing competing theories. That’s good for a high-tension Christie novel, but here, it’s all about the vibes, and once I realized that they’d intentionally removed the solve-it-at-home aspect, I was able to relax and enjoy the ride.

Anyway, that’s my theory of cozy mysteries, and while I hesitate to tar the entire genre with this critique, since I’ve by no means assessed a representative sample, I will say that The Coffee Cake Caper didn’t disabuse me of my stereotypes. Setting-wise, we’re clearly in cozy territory: the protagonist, a neophyte sleuth, is called to a British carnival where a longstanding baking competition has been thrown into chaos by the disappearance of one contestant’s dough during an overnight proof (shades of Bingate). While the stakes eventually do rise slightly (groan), there isn’t even the slightest flavor of danger to proceedings, and the characters are an enjoyable cast who, if anything, could have been a bit more eccentric: you get two bakers (one uptight, one flashy), a somewhat diffident judge, a stolid night-watchman… It’s a fun world to inhabit, and is fleshed out to a reasonable degree, with the carnival’s environs enlivened with just the right amount of detail. There’s a fair bit of exposition and characters giving their alibis, but it’s all written with a light touch and moves along at a good clip.

But this isn’t just an explore-and-chat-em-up, this is a mystery, and that’s where Coffee Cake Caper’s troubles begin. First, the interface is not well suited to the gameplay on offer. The main interactivity is a series of mad-libs deductions where you must poke holes in the stories of each of the suspects, before transitioning to the finale where you solve the case once and for all (there are a handful of places where the game feints at providing some branching options, but these are invariably but-thou-must Hobson’s choices). The mechanics are simple enough – you fill out the contents of an accusation, then list the three or four pieces of evidence that that support your contention – but the implementation left me flailing. For one thing, despite the fact that the text frequently mentions that you’re taking notes about the clues you discover, there are no handy player aids keeping track of what you discovered; hopefully you were doing that on your own, or enjoy scrolling back through thousands of words of infodumps, in order to review the case file. For another, sometimes the grammar required is strained – at one point I wanted to accuse someone of lying about when they went home, but I had to render it as lying about “when you took the car” – and the fiddliness of getting everything exactly right can lead to farce, as when it took me five tries to figure out how to call out a carnie for eating some of the missing dough, when I’d caught him red-handed with some of it in his waste basket and on his collar (my problem – shared by the walkthrough – is that I called his clothes a uniform rather than a costume). And making everything much more annoying, the order of clues within each drop-down menu is randomized, I suppose to punish lawnmowering, which means hunting for the five or six specific items you’re looking for is always a pain.

Beyond these mechanics, the mystery itself relies on soaring leaps of logic and frequently calls back to small details mentioned at most in passing long before the player knows they should be relevant. Admittedly there are a few places where this is done elegantly – there’s an early bit in the parking lot where the descriptions of two cars sets up a later chain of logical reasoning that I felt clever for figuring out. But for the most part it’s intensely frustrating and had me running to the walkthrough, with the most egregious example being an endgame deduction that requires the player to work out that a character’s brand-new outfit indicates they’d had to change out of a soiled one – except as far as I can tell from the transcript of my session, the only indication they were wearing new clothes is that when they were first introduced, at the very beginning of the game, their outfit is described as “sharp.”

For a passively-consumed cozy mystery, this wouldn’t raise an eyebrow – you’re here for Diffany and Cornie’s ridiculous rivalry and more-ridiculous names, not to play Sherlock Holmes. But enlisting the player in a mystery constructed this opaquely is no fun, even if you were going into it expecting to exercise your little gray cells to their utmost. With a system that didn’t demand quite so much specificity of the player, and that highlighted important clues so you could spend more time testing theories and less hunting through walls of text, it would all go down a lot easier. So, for that matter, would quashing the bugs that twice required me to start over when clicking a link grayed it out but didn’t display any new text – fortunately that only happened in Chrome, and I was able to reach the end in Firefox. The mystery could also use fewer red herrings, and more logically-clued deductions, to truly sing (some testers could really help with ironing such things out; none are currently listed in the credits, but the difficulty of an investigation is very hard for an author to gauge, meaning their feedback is especially important in this kind of game). There’s a lot that’s appealing about the Coffee Cake Caper, from the solid prose to the appealing characters, but as is so often the case in a competition, it would benefit from a bit more time in the oven and some outside perspective – here’s hoping for a post-festival release that smooths out the rough patches and makes for a more enjoyable ride!

Originally written on the intfiction forums. Minor edits were made.

You are Anna Pointed, a detective on her first case - the disappearance of a baking contest participant’s ingredients. Talk to five quirky individuals, learn their alibis, remember details of noteworthy items and scenery, confront people on their lies, and uncover the truth (and some personally embarrassing secrets)!

The system appears to be a custom one made by the author. It sort of resembles the way default Ink games look. The game doesn’t force you to memorize details, as you can scroll through previous text, all the way back to the beginning if you so desire. You’ll need it, as you’ll be quizzed on small details dating back to before you started talking to the suspects and victim, through completing sentences using available evidence from dropdown menus. The game is forgiving and will let you guess as many times as you want without penalty. Realistically, the person who hired a detective would probably tell her to get out after seeing her fumble her accusations fruitlessly for eight turns straight, but that would be tremendously unfun.

In the beginning, exposing contradictions was not too troublesome, but in the end, it starts to become a chore as the amount of past text increases. This can compound if you’re me and banged your head against one of the puzzles for quite some time before finally resorting to looking at the walkthrough. By late game I had to CTRL + F the whole text log for people’s names, pieces of evidence, etc. Additionally, the dropdown method led to some frustration in two cases where I had the right idea but didn’t pass due to having to fit my idea into a specific sentence structure and unclear evidence naming (could be alleviated by, for example, using (Spoiler - click to show)“Dorian’s costume” and “Barnaby’s uniform” instead of just “costume” and “uniform”).

Other than that, the plot made sense with fun writing and it was personally fun having my starting theory be proven half-right as I approached the final segments. Definitely take your own notes for this one.