Winter-Over

A murder mystery set in Antarctica!

The PC is a maintenance worker at a small station during the winter season, whose brother Daniel (also a worker there), has been murdered. First of all, this is such a good explanation for the “locked down with limited suspects” setup and why an ordinary person is investigating the case. The writing is evocative and represents this well — I loved the atmosphere of the isolated station, the cold starkness, the increasing stress as the killer starts to retaliate against you. The scenery descriptions change throughout to become more ominous, which was a nice touch. The writing was well done, you get the sense of a grieving, frantic person who's not the most professional at investigating, and the character dynamics and relationships felt natural.

The main gameplay revolves around talking to colleagues, establishing alibis, sorting out their relationships to Daniel and each other, and determining possible motives. The game responded well to the information you gained — if you learned an incriminating fact you could confront that person and get the option to talk about it. I rarely felt that I was stuck, at any moment there was at least one thing I'm following up on, it felt natural to chase one lead after another.

The game adds complications as everyone moves around the station, and it can take a while to track down a specific person. You have to sleep and engage in various activities to manage stress, and you need to do activities with specific characters to increase rapport with them and get them to share information. The officials arrive in 10 days, so there's a trade-off between paying attention to self care and friendships, and pushing through the investigation. The killer also sabotages things to distract you and waste your time, which nicely added to the increasingly tense atmosphere.

I identified the killer by (Spoiler - click to show) getting into Daniel's phone and finding a note the killer wrote, but I got too stressed at the end and killed him accidentally, oops, so I never found out his motives or the murder weapon (although I suspect it's related to Jack's faulty data and Daniel being nosy). It would be interesting to replay and focus on Jack, to see what else I can discover.

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

Is there a better setting for anything than Antarctica? It’s obviously aces for horror: the isolation and existential precariousness of the Ice ramps up the social-paranoia body horror of the Thing and the cosmic vertigo of At the Mountains of Madness. It’s just as obviously the ne plus ultra for wilderness adventure, from Shackleton’s thrilling journey of survival to Scott’s dramatic narrative of, er, not survival. Now Winter-Over demonstrates that the South Pole works just as well for a psychologically-driven whodunnit. What’s next – sitcoms? Reality shows? Infomercials?

This choice-based game wastes little time on setup or backstory laying out your life before coming to Antarctica – all that matters is that you’re something of a veteran and used some of your connections to bring your brother, who’s a bit of a screw-up, along on your latest expedition. So when he turns up dead one evening with an unexplained head-wound, of course you’re not going to take the base administrator’s advice and just wait ten days until an investigative team can fly in from New Zealand – despite the fact that the mental pressures of spending a whole winter at the bottom of the world were already starting to get to you, you launch your own search for the killer.

This makes for a classic setup, but the polar milieu helps justify many of the genre’s conventions. Nobody’s cell phones are connected to the Internet, for one thing, cutting out a whole lot of needed contrivances, and the isolation of the facility means that the cast of suspects can be kept manageable and close to hand once the progress of your investigation drives the murderer to take a more active role. The paranoid, desperate vibe that comes from knowing you’re sleeping mere feet from whoever killed your brother also helps increase the urgency, and justifies the game’s light self-care mechanics – an always-visible bit of the interface tells you your current stress level, which you can manage by sleeping or doing some non-investigative activities; I never let it get too high, so I’m not sure if a game-ending breakdown is actually possible, but a lot of the descriptions do shift based on elevated stress to underline how ragged you’ve become, which feels like an elegant way to incorporate the mental toll of the investigation. Contrarily, there are a few times when you need to build rapport with a suspect before they’ll trust you with a clue. It’s a logical enough turn to take the plot, but the relationship-building mechanics felt a little too bare and transactional to me – if you were always choosing who to hang out with, it might come off more natural, but since that stuff takes time away from the investigation I pretty much only made a gardening date or shared a stock-room shift with someone when I was intending to pump them for information.

Outside of those few exceptions, though, most of what you do during your time on the base is talk. There are a dozen or so people around, but many of them have verifiable alibis, so your investigation quickly comes to focus on five key suspects. Interviewing them to find out about their whereabouts on the night of the murder, and probing for any hidden motives or animosity they might be harboring, takes up the first few days of the game and opens up a bunch of new leads – going to the non-suspect personnel to verify the things they’ve said. There are a few puzzles involving computers or physical evidence, but even these are resolved through social means, since you’re typically forced to ask for the assistance of characters with the relevant skills to progress. There are points in the game where the amount of information all this talking turned up was a little hard to hold in my head; fortunately, there’s a handy sidebar that summarizes everything you’ve learned, including breaking down the names and schedules of all of the characters. I didn’t need to use it much, but I appreciated having the security blanket there in case I did.

As for the characters, they’re a nicely-rounded lot. The dialogue trees aren’t especially sprawling, and a few of them definitely are just playing bit parts, but the authors do a lot with a little, efficiently communicating Christian’s slight awkwardness or Victor’s incipient mania without laying things on too thick. I especially enjoyed the grounded humor the doctor, Matt, brought to the table:

“Everything was okay between the two of you?” you press. “You hadn’t fought recently or anything?”
“No,” he says. “What about you?”
“Me?” you say (sounding kind of stupid even to yourself). “What do you mean?”
“I’m just asking you the same thing you asked me,” he says.
“Yeah, but why?” you say, unable to keep the frustration from your tone.
He shrugs. “I don’t know, why did you ask?”
You sigh. “You know what, forget it.”

And yeah, there are jokes. While the plot and overall mood is grim, Winter-Over isn’t too heavy; the death of your brother is even slightly underplayed, I suspect intentionally because depicting it with all the shades of psychological realism would make for an intense, unfun experience at odds with the Miss Marple gameplay on offer. Still, there are moments of real threat, especially in a few gripping scenes where the murder tries to turn the tables on you, and the ending, where the protagonist finally opens themself back up to feeling the entirety of what they’ve gone through. I wouldn’t have minded a few more opportunities for the game to play up its brooding setting – there are one or two memorable set pieces that take advantage of being in Antarctica, but locations like the observation deck go mostly unused in the main gameplay, meaning you spend most of your time wandering around corridors that could as easily be on a spaceship or under the sea as at the pole.

The mystery itself, meanwhile, is a good one, with methodical investigation yielding up secrets as well as red herrings; it plays fair, too, with a solution that doesn’t change based on your actions. It’s perhaps tuned a bit easy, since I cracked the case halfway through the ten-day time limit, but I did get slightly lucky in the order I attempted things (Spoiler - click to show)(look, if you introduce one of the scientists by saying they hang out with the boss a bunch because “fiftysomething white guys need other fiftysomething white guys with whom to discuss football or how weird it is that their young relations aren’t buying houses or whatever,” of course I’m going to suspect one or both of them of being the baddie), and spending the remaining time running down other leads remained engaging. The ultimate motive is perhaps a little deflating, and the fact that the killer seems reticent to directly harm you at first when they’ve just brutally murdered your brother feels a bit strange, but it’s all put together reasonably enough to reward logical deduction (the only goof I noticed is that (Spoiler - click to show)even after I’d twigged that Jack was the killer by showing him the threatening note, the narration still gave him the benefit of the doubt when he lied about the ruler piece used to wedge my door closed).

All told this is a smooth, satisfying whodunnit. Sure, some of its mechanics might be more robust than others, but it executes the tricky feats of plate-spinning the genre requires with aplomb; similarly, while possibly more could have been done to leverage the polar setting, what’s here is more than enough to make for a memorably claustrophobic investigation. Now, will the streamers pick up the baton, with Death Comes to McMurdo launching on Netflix soon? Only time will tell.

(Oh, and let me close this review with bonus appreciation to the included bibliography, especially the article about the 100-year old “almost edible” fruitcake; call me old-fashioned but in my book something can be “almost edible” about as easily as someone can be “almost pregnant”).

Note: This review was written during IFComp 2024, and originally posted in the authors' section of the intfiction forum on 22 Sep 2024.

This is a tightly written crime mystery set in an Antarctic research station. Implemented in Twine, and running over a taut 10 days of investigation.

I liked an awful lot about this. The writing is strong, building a palpable increasing sense of tension as you play. The emotional stakes for solving the crime are high ((Spoiler - click to show)I had terrible fears from the start of the game). And the constantly advancing time, and the knowledge that you only have a tight time limit to work within, was gripping.

There are some neat tricks in the game interface. Just at the point where you start investigating, and the game says you’d better take notes, a notes section appears in the web interface, which updates as you find new information and clues. There is also a handy character list you can refer to.

I did find the running around from location to location a little exasperating. I’d often be looking for a given person, but unless they were in the obvious place I seemed to spend a lot of time going searching. Which, to be fair, maybe represents how it would feel on the spot in this setting. But was a bit frustrating for this player. Though on rechecking a save file I seem to have missed the location schedules for the characters, which are provided in game in (Spoiler - click to show)the notes section. How did I miss those previously?

There are resource management issues to contend with. You need to look after your welfare, but that uses up time and opportunities for further investigations. What to prioritise becomes quite a decision, and can influence later outcomes.

At the end of the ten days - if you last that long - you get a chance to accuse someone of being the murderer. I am moderately astonished that I got this right at first go. Though I had saved just before, so tried reloading after to see what happened if I chose someone else. Even if you accuse correctly, I think the nature of the ending will vary, depending on choices you made earlier. Which is nice.

But yes, a very good game. Highly recommended.

(review based on the IFComp 2024 version)

A murder-investigation within the confines of a polar research station. Which provides one of the most convincing in-game reasons as to why the investigator is just a regular guy I’ve read so far. The complete opposite of the strained Miss Marple situation.

Searching the crime scene (or the rest of the station) for physical evidence is but a minor aspect of the investigation, and when it does happen it seems more triggered by the game-state than by the player’s systematic exploration. The most important tool in your investigation by far is the questioning of your cohabitants in the research center.

Despite being centered on interrogation and conversation, Winter-Over did not succeed in convincing me of the “reality” of the characters. I kept having the image that they were actors dutifully reciting their scripted lines, but without passion for or connection to the part or to the other characters.

Finding out when to go where to find a specific person to talk to or ask help from requires a lot of walking around the station, in the hope of bumping into someone you haven’t met yet. Each such meeting is added to your (very handy!) notebook so you gradually compile a schedule for each NPC. I found this tedious at times, and I kept wishing one of the crew would have stuck a note on the fridge with a complete roster for me to find.

The notebook is a great feature, serving not only to compile a table of when to find who where, but also as a checklist of characters and their alibis and statements. It provides a simple way to compare their words against other clues you’ve already gathered, and it helps to keep track of your immediate subgoals.

Tempo picks up as events are triggered in the station out of the player’s control, heightening the tension. It’s through these events that the claustrophobic and anxiety-inducing feeling of being locked in a small container with a killer on the loose is really emphasised.

The mental state/condition the game takes its name from, the “winter-over”, is similar to cabin fever, or perhaps “winter-over” is the specific term for exactly this condition as experienced on an isolated polar station. In the game, it’s a possible explanation for the killer’s violent behaviour. It’s also set up as a narrative device for casting doubts on the sanity of the player character, raising suspicions in the player’s mind that the PC may be a wholly unreliable narrator. This didn’t work too well for me; apart from some descriptions where the protagonist explicitly questions his (I pictured the PC as male) own mind, I found no reason to distrust the protagonist’s account of events.

I enjoyed working through the mystery, but my experience was more that of a distanced observer than a fully engaged participant.

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!

I beta tested this game.

This is a murder mystery set on an Antarctic ice station. A murder has been discovered, and you are highly motivated to solve it. Unfortunately, without any real authority, all you can do is gather evidence and hope people find it.

The game is set out on a time-based system. You have a certain number of days until the real authorities are available. Each day is split up into 4 time periods (I think). During each time period you can interview someone, bond with someone, or do a couple special activities. Sometimes timed events come your way.

Conversation can be down just by clicking each link, but sometimes a new piece of evidence can add new topics, which adds complexity to the game.

Some actions require a closer relationship with someone or extended time, which means you may have to replay if you make poor choices early on.

I found the mystery intriguing and the clues logical. It's in the format where the player amasses enough evidence to satisfy themselves, and then you select a murderer to accuse (like Toby's Nose, for instance), but the game can prompt you when you have enough evidence.

Overall, I liked this mystery. The time and stress meters add some extra complexity, and the Notes system helped me stay organized and not have to worry I was going to forget something important. I think this will do pretty well in the competition, although there are many good games this year to compete against!