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Accuse

by David A. Wheeler

Mystery
2007

Web Site

(based on 17 ratings)
3 reviews

About the Story

This is a small puzzle/game where you must determine who murdered someone, with what, and where, by making a series of accusations. The solution, suspect placement, and weapon placement is random each time. It's a fun little puzzle on its own (murder mysteries are still a common genre), and perhaps more importantly it's a small demonstration/trial of Inform7's new English-language syntax (which the author wanted to try out). This is a different game than Clue/Cluedo: it has different game rules, goals, and names. For example, each accusation must be completely different from the previous one, and your goal is to minimize time. You can get this game from http://www.dwheeler.com. This game is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2 or later, so you can even make modifications to this or include a modified version of it in your own games.


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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
A textbook example of a logic puzzle in I-F, May 25, 2008
by Ron Newcomb (Seattle)

Much like the board game Clue, this is a simple logic puzzle wherein the player must decide the who, where, and with-what of a murder. The player makes an accusation and the game responds if it's right, wrong, or partially right. There's only three items in each category, which thankfully speeds up the game. While the stipulation that any two accusations in a row must completely differ from each other in all categories adds a little extra challenge, the endgame is longer than need be as one has to rearrange items and people to "cleanse the palette" so one can finally make the accusation one actually wishes to.

A piece of paper to record accusations and their results helps one play the game more efficiently, but the work should keep track of this stuff automatically. Say, a listing within the inventory command.

Charmingly, the supernatural ability that the PC possesses is said again and again to have no explanation whatsoever.

This work is a textbook example of using a particular kind of logic puzzle in I-F.

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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
Works better as a board game, September 22, 2010
by Victor Gijsbers (The Netherlands)

Accuse is recognisable as an implementation of the well-known board game Clue, albeit with some important differences:

1. There are fewer people, weapons and locations.
2. The player character is not one of the suspects.
3. After making an accusation, you do not get to see one card used in your accusation, but you hear whether none or some of the elements of your accusation were correct.
4. Two successive accusation may not have any element in common.
5. You need to carry around the weapons and direct the people to the rooms you want to make an accusation about.
6. You're playing against a turn counter, rather than against someone else; you can only do better or worse by taking more or less time.

Most of these changes don't make a real difference, although they do somewhat change the logic of the deduction. The important differences are 4 and 6: 6 reduces the tension of the game, while 4 introduces somewhat needless tedium. As you can see, I'm not exactly under the impression that the changes make the game better.

The main problem here is that the game combines a certain amount of tedium (having to direct people to locations, having to make "in-between" accusations because of rule 4) with very little pay-off: the logic problem is exceedingly easy, and solving it does not give one a sense of success. For your quick logic fix, you're better off playing some Loopy (or "apt-get install sgt-puzzles").

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
A tiny logic puzzle in Inform, March 25, 2018
by verityvirtue (London)
Related reviews: sanguine

A short, minimal puzzle parser game, with a similar concept to Clue, in which you have to figure out the location of a murderer, the weapon used and the murderer. As a slight complication, you can’t use the same element (location, weapon or murderer) in consecutive accusations.

There are some self-referencing Easter egg-style props, and characters that sound like they could be condiments on a fried egg, but the game is basically that. If you’re used to this kind of game, one playthrough could take about 5 minutes. A little rough around the edges, but it’s a bit like one of those little plastic toys you can fidget with.

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Accuse on IFDB

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Pieces of Games by Ron Newcomb
Sometimes the best way to understand a type of puzzle or interaction is a pithy, stand-alone example of it.

Polls

The following polls include votes for Accuse:

Procedurally generated IF by verityvirtue
Looking for IF which uses procedural generation (? I'm not a programmer) to derive its writing, story, etc.

Games with "logical" puzzles by Victor Gijsbers
Some puzzles--like chess problems or sudokus--can be difficult even though you know all the rules. I'm looking for IF games with this kind of puzzle: you can get to know the rules by simple exploration, and then you still have to solve...

Great games that consist of a single puzzle by Spike
I'm looking for well-designed and challenging games that revolve around solving a single puzzle. The puzzle may have multiple parts, but the whole game needs to be essentially about solving that single puzzle.




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