Winter-Over

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

There is a reason John Carpenter’s The Thing is a classic. Ok, there’s a lot of reasons, but a big one relevant to W-O is the setting. A tight setting, isolated by a vast, hostile environment, trapped with an entity you can’t identify bent on harm… that is pure, cask strength drama right there. My adrenaline is already pumping, now make it a murder mystery? Where that tension is an active gameplay force that must be constantly reckoned with? Holy Crap game, I’m only human!

With that pitch line, you would have to almost deliberately poison the well to earn my dissatisfaction. No fear. Not only is the writing effective, the gameplay mechanisms engaging, the research prominent but not overwhelming… not only all that, the mystery itself is really well constructed! A murder close to the protagonist/player occurs. Thanks to alibis at the time, six of the station’s number are suspects. You are on the clock to solve the mystery before the clumsy, incompetent hands of outsiders let the killer go free. (Ok, that last seems unlikely but I’ll go with it.)

Follows a series of forensic facts, interrogations, relationship, clock and mental health management that all impact your ability to get clues and not completely dissemble. And full-on legit deductive processing of data, forming and testing hypotheses to narrow down the suspect pool. This is tough to pull off, but oh so rewarding. We should not underestimate the social/mental management aspect of this. It is the extra charge that elevates its challenge, compounding a purely cerebral exercise with real tension and tradeoffs. Augment this with external dramatic turns by an active adversary and it is part Agatha Christie, part Cat and Mouse and part One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Those are some pretty great parts!

It is not flawless. At several points, the text attributed knowledge or facts to the proceedings I had not previously discovered (one example being (Spoiler - click to show)store camera footage expressing suspicions not previously aired). My notes describe funkiness with a Missing ID, though the details elude my memory. Some descriptions (Spoiler - click to show)specifically the handedness of one suspect are repeated in a per-suspect summary screen. Other crucial data points that should be immediately and easily obvious, you are never given opportunity to establish. Yeah, hiding information that should not be hidden is grating in the moment, but there are so many other interlocking details to navigate that that frustration is momentary at best.

As engaging and compelling as the gameplay and mystery were, the ending really tied it all up for me. I managed to develop a confident guess at the identity of the killer by eliminating the other suspects one by one. Mentally, not violently! I’M not the killer! I had some likely hints to motive, but nothing conclusive or prosecutable. Here’s the problem with mystery game replays: once you solve the mystery, what is left? This game did something I’ve never seen before. It responded to my incomplete conclusion with a correspondingly ambiguous end screen! Sure, I’ve gotten PLENTY of ‘the killer got away’ game climaxes. So, so many. I’m like a one man rubber stamp parole board. What I haven’t seen before is ‘I guess you PROBABLY got it, but… here’s some things that maybe… just think about it, okay?’ I mean, I’m 75% sure I got it, but that last 25% is DELICIOUS. The end screen I got was a masterful combination of closure and ambiguity that felt precisely tuned to my gameplay accomplishments. I’m not sure how granular those ending messages are, how many will fit as well as that one did, but my climax was the most satisfying ‘MAYBE’ I’ve ever experienced. It may just drive me to another play to resolve.

Played: 9/17/24
Playtime: 1.25hr, solved? pretty sure solved, but open questions
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaged/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again?: Actually, I just might

Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless