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.