The Coffee Cake Caper

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.