Winter-Over

Wrapping this year's reviews with one more murder mystery! This is another one in the vein of The Killings in Wasacona: you have a limited amount of time to solve the case, important actions all consume fractions of this time, and the clock controls various opportunities (e.g. a character might only be available in the evening, since she's asleep in the mornings). It's also a choice-based Twine piece.

Winter-Over, though, crosses this with a classic closed circle scenario: a murder occurred among the staff of an Antarctic research station in the middle of polar winter, and nobody will be able to enter or leave for ten days. Which means the killer must have been one of your coworkers…and until you can find and confront them, you're locked in with them, with no means of escape. The game is named after the "winter-over syndrome" that affects people wintering over in the research bases, which is definitely getting to the protagonist as the game progresses—managing your levels of stress is vital, and all the descriptions of rooms and characters in the game change as you become stressed, becoming increasingly paranoid.

The atmosphere is excellent, but I admit I struggled with the interface. The majority of the gameplay involves exploring the station, figuring out which people will be at which places at which times, and asking them questions. Questioning one person might unlock new dialogue with another—if Alice says her alibi was playing board games with Bob, then you can go talk to Bob to confirm or deny it, and then potentially go back to Alice to push her on the contradiction—and a convenient NOTES tab automatically keeps track of what you've learned about everyone's schedule.

Another part of the gameplay, though, involves doing various tasks (gardening, dishes, etc) with people to reduce your stress and improve your relationship with them. The better your relationship is, the more they'll tell you. But I got hopelessly stuck on this part for a while, because I thought I needed to find the appropriate NPC in the appropriate room for it—you don't, if you choose to do dishes, you can summon any NPC from anywhere in the station to do them with you, instead of only the one in the cafeteria.

(On the interface side, I also didn't love how often the game presented text one paragraph at a time with a "click to continue" link, instead of an actual choice or a full page of text to read. But that's not uncommon in Twine, it's just not my style, so I can't dock points for that.)

Once I figured out the interface, I quickly ruled out all but one of the suspects. But I kept searching, since I didn't have a motive, and I wasn't sure if the rest of the staff would accept my logic without one—and thus gave the killer the chance to try to silence me! Maybe I could have ended the case a few days earlier, but having that uncertainty, and getting attacked for it, was a high point. It felt like it was happening because of how I was playing the character, rather than just being scripted (even though, of course, it was), and immersed me well in the situation.

I also found the two twists (what (Spoiler - click to show)Victor was up to and what (Spoiler - click to show)Bob was up to) excellent, and it ended the story on a very high note. The ambience, and how it changed with my stress level, was great, and the logistical management was very fun. There are just a few things I wish had been different:
- I wish the stress-reducing activities tied into the logistics of the station more, instead of being able to summon NPCs anywhere at any time; this would probably need more activities in different rooms, but it would also play up that stress gets worse when you're alone
- The days and nights kind of blurred together, which I'm sure is intentional, but also meant I quickly lost track of how many days I had left; adding something like "three days until the authorities arrive" to the date display would have helped that, since I have no idea if I finished with one day left or with five (I very quickly forgot which date the deadline was)

Overall, though, a very fun mystery, and a good note to end on!