Accuse

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.

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").

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.