Mayor Mystery

Mayor Mystery is one of those games that puts on a front, and turns out to be more than it appears. You receive an anonymous letter saying that the town mayor has joined a group offering him "great power," and you're suspicious. The game is a town simulation where completing your first main story run is pretty easy. But there's a lot of side content and unlockable endings, including some more bizarre ones like (Spoiler - click to show)marrying a restaurant mascot cutout, (Spoiler - click to show)going to the barber until all your hair gets shaved off and then joining a cult for bald men, and (Spoiler - click to show)dying from eating unhealthy cereal.

The game has a lot of meta content. For example, the opening scenario is actually a test to see if you act according to the good guy the intro says you're supposed to be. You can keep messing it up to get different scenarios and make the narration angry. This comes into play later in the game.

There's also a full soundtrack, which consists of synthesized piano music. It's pretty comprehensive: the apartment music has different instruments depending on whose room you're in, and there are a few jingles for victories or defeats. The music fit the mood well and I enjoyed having it.

I also have to compliment how tight the game's programming is. I didn't come across any unintentional bugs, and there were a lot of moments where the game would respond to something I did that was out of the way. There are even a few different minigames to play in the arcade, while is cool to see implemented in Twine. For what appears to be the author's first game, there's some advanced programming on display and I have to give the game props for being so comprehensive.

Here's the spoiler content. You'll run into it about ten minutes into the game, but it's a big moment. (Spoiler - click to show)On a repeat playthrough, you unlock a new location: Bloomhurst Lake. It's intentionally broken and does not work. When you leave, it explains it was going to be DLC, but was cut midway through development because it did not add anything meaningful. This leads to another section where you and the game designer exit into Twine itself to find the narrator and ask why the alternate endings exist?

When you restart the game, it takes the form of beta testing for a sequel, where adjustments have been made to the story and gameplay. I was interested in where this would go: the game only has one linear path and you can see remnants of what was removed. Unfortunately, the writing doesn't hold up here. It's constantly bogged down with old memes, re-using the same jokes, and kinda lazy meta humor. I noticed some of this in the initial playthroughs, but this entire section confused me. It had a perfect horror setup, and could have played with the concept of everything you know being different, but they went for this modern humor that didn't work. I appreciate the commitment with making an actual Google Form to submit feedback to.

After this, you get a minigame where you answer quiz questions about the game for money. Then I got stuck -- there's a wall of 16 buttons, and it says the results show up "tomorrow". I was never able to figure out how to progress after this point. I noticed one button changed things in the computer lab, and another gave me a bonus weapon for the fight with the mayor, but I couldn't figure out what any of the other ones did. At this point, I kept using the hints on the end screen to find more endings. I got 17 endings and all 8 of the unique mayor fights, then the hints stopped appearing.

I was kind of confused as to what the game is going for. (Spoiler - click to show)The writing sticks to a comedic tone in a sort of flat way, and when I was suspecting it would be a disguised horror story, it cranked the jokes up even more. The fourth wall aspect with the game's narrators talking to each other is interesting, as is one inserting themselves into the game as an in-universe character. The satire on game sequels and DLC also felt out of nowhere, since once I hit the button wall, I got the rest of the endings without being reminded of this aspect. Again, I couldn't finish it, so I might be missing something overall. But I think the game could have used more focus. Maybe the goal was just to come up with a bunch of crazy alternate endings?