Toby's Nose

Looking for a palate-cleanser after finishing the Zork trilogy, my wife and I settled on Toby's Nose, a delightful little one-ish room game released by Chandler Groover in 2015. You take the role of trusty basset hound Toby and are tasked with helping Sherlock Holmes solve his latest murder case. While this is technically a one-room game in that you never actually leave the Drawing Room you start in, you are able to explore a variety of locales in excruciating detail using your incomparable olfactory sense. By simply sniffing you are able to track movements, uncover clues, explore buildings, and even recreate long past events as though you were there. While this sometimes stretches the player's suspension of disbelief, it's such a clever and well-executed mechanic and the revealed descriptions are so vibrant and immersive that it is easily forgiven.

The writing in this game is superb! Every description drips with sensory detail, from the pristine garden to the smog-choked London streets. You can see and feel every location and every event just as clear as Toby can smell them. The core mechanic of chasing smells within smells to dive further and further into the world outside the Drawing Room is so intuitive and satisfying that each new juicy description feels like its own reward. Just about everything can be delved into for more detail, no matter how small. Sometimes it reveals a direct clue, sometimes wider context, sometimes just definitions or flavor.

Which brings me to my first and only main criticism of the game - there is SO MUCH extraneous detail! Once you've found a variety of clues and have explored areas thoroughly, there are so many rabbit holes to jump down that have no relevance to the plot. While this contributes to the vibrance of the world, it can get frustrating when you're looking for the one detail that you missed somewhere and each description reveals eight more things, none of which bring you closer to finding the one you're missing. To help with this, the game includes a very creative hint mode that can be turned on and set to either italicize all the things you can smell or also bold the actually important things. I was disappointed that after playing for a couple hours and feeling as though I had thoroughly exhausted all possible avenues of investigation, I turned this on and retraced all the steps through the important keywords to find there was a single one I had missed that held the final clue I needed to identify the murderer.

Most of the clues you'll find are circumstantial evidence at best, but this actually works very well. It guides the player to identify what happened while also allowing them to fill in the gaps with their own narrative about the characters actions and motivations. You really feel like you're solving the mystery yourself, rather than just finding the plot beats that the game wants you to find. Despite the vague evidence, there is enough there to solidly solve the murder. If you feel like you aren't sure, you haven't found everything yet. That said, the narrative my wife and I deduced (Spoiler - click to show)cleanly tied all the actions of all the characters together into one string of events that very satisfyingly wrapped everything up. Though we identified the murderer correctly, the story the game exposits at the end was (Spoiler - click to show)a fair bit simpler than the one we came up with and was much less satisfying as (Spoiler - click to show)many of the seemingly suspicious actions of the characters ended up being red herrings.

The only other minor criticism I have is that as you discover clues, you will occasionally be given a bit of dialogue that Toby had overheard earlier in the day. This gives some insight into the characters and speaks to the relevance of the clue you just found. However, once you've seen this dialogue there doesn't seem to be any way to repeat it. Though the clue gets added to your inventory, there is no indication of where you found the clue, nor does sniffing the clue again repeat the dialogue. Although this is not necessary - all the information you need is in the descriptions themselves - it would have been helpful to avoid having to track down where you had seen a particular clue before and being able to replay the dialogue would help when solidifying your own version of the events that unfolded.

Overall, this was a lovely game and a nice change of pace from the forest and cave, lock and key style adventures we've been playing through. Were it not for finding that last clue feeling a bit like pixel-hunting in a graphical adventure game, I would give this a full five stars. As it stands, I'll go with an extremely high 4 and very strong recommendation to any text adventure aficionados. Don't pass this one up!