| Average Rating: Number of Reviews Written by IFDB Members: 10 |
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!
What makes or breaks a mystery title for me and many others is the investigation. One can craft the most intricate mysteries with clever plot twists, but if you aren't able to make the investigation interesting, you aren't really playing on the mysteriousness of mysteries. You're just making a puzzle for yourself.
Toby's Nose seems to get this. You're a dog, so you have to smell everything. Each scent leads to another scent, but they act more like impressions of other rooms. You have to read carefully and think about what might be important to sniff about. It's not just a gimmick, it's a proper investigation methodology where you learn so much about characters' backgrounds and where they've been.
This also leads to some interesting stream-of-consciousness narration. While the title likes to delve into mostly period accurate linguistic fancies, you are never too detached from the perspective of a dog. Your narration reflects a dog living in those Victorian times: the "worlds" these scents conjure are still spaces that dogs (and not humans) would particularly notice. So much of the sensual description revolves around smell, which shouldn't be surprising, but it is still impressive how much the title lands this aspect. You really do feel like you're a dog detective.
I also quite enjoy how you're supposed to "solve" the mystery too. You are supposed to explore all the scents to your content (more likely scenario: as much as you could) and then figure out what actually happened by barking at them. If you're not savescumming and you're indeed thinking things through, the game doesn't really hold your hand. You need to go over the clues, think about how they are connected to the case, and then finally bark them. It makes nabbing the culprit so satisfying because the clues are just waiting to be connected and there's no gimmick or theatrics with it. It's just you and the clues.
All in all, I find this to be a compelling mystery with a really interesting way to do investigation. It's short enough that it doesn't wear its welcome and the game pushes this idea to its limits. I personally find it thrilling to discover new clues through smell. Every new clue strikes me with awe and wonder and I feel I was being rewarded for careful "smelling". Any mystery that makes investigations exciting is always worth commending about.
Le avventure investigative sono le mie preferite, poi qui c'è Sherlock Holmes in persona quindi il top. Ben strutturata anche la storia, con tante false piste e tranelli. Peccato che di enigmi veri e propri non ce ne siano: bisogna solo "annusare" (letteralmente) quasi ogni singola parola che compare sullo schermo, col rischio che possa sfuggircene una importantissima impedendoci di risolvere il mistero (così è capitato a me purtroppo).
I don't know what to say that hasn't already been said by others but
- I adore this game
- Every time I try to get someone into interactive fiction I recommend this game as an amazing example that's not too difficult (you need to be able to look and smell and bark, that's it) yet full of astounding depth
- It was one of my two main interactive fiction inspirations (the other being Color the Truth) for Erstwhile (I hyped it up so much for my co-writer). Let that say what it will.
I love dogs, I love Sherlock, and I love this adventure!
Use your nose to find clues, stimulate evocative visions of events and piece together the story behind the crime.
A canine whodunit dripping with atmospheric old London vibes, wry observations and doggie wisdom.
A tough one story adventure with a few red herrings and a good hint system if you get stuck.
Thoroughly recommended!
A man has been murdered, and Sherlock Holmes is on the case. The police have been summoned, the suspects have been assembled, and Watson is taking notes. All that's left is for the dog to bark at the culprit. Wait, what?
As a die-hard Sherlock Holmes fan, I was immediately drawn to the premise, and once I got my hands on it I was not disappointed. Toby's Nose is an absolutely gorgeous game, and the writing is as authentic and enthralling as possible.
You are Toby, the dog with the famous nose, and it's your job to smell out the killer - there's a treat in it for you. Indeed, that's quite literally how you do it - but as a dog, your sense of smell transcends time and space, one smell opening up avenues and possibilities and other smells. The descriptions are marvelously deep and often entertaining - I was blown away by how immersive it all was, and how the breadcrumbs were laid to draw you into a final conclusion about what happened.
I read Toby's Nose directly after Lime Ergot, and as the author mentions in his note, the non-traditional method of exploration and the concept of layered descriptions is very similar, but cleverly implemented and explained so as to be unique enough. I love the concept of a dog's smelling ability - or maybe just Toby's - being so acute that it can detect smells within smells and therefore describe times and places and events without having to actually go there.
Toby's Nose is a true gem, and as a fan of Holmes and murder mysteries it really impressed me. Five cheese crumpets.
Time to completion: 40-45 minutes
Groover presents a game in the best tradition of the locked-room murder mystery, featuring a canine protagonist. As with other games featuring canine protagonists, the sense of smell is tremendously important. In fact, in Toby's Nose, >SMELL acts like how >EXAMINE does in Lime Ergot. In fact, the author's note acknowledges the contribution of Lime Ergot and Pacian's Castle of the Red Prince in his coming up with the game's core mechanic.
Toby's Nose is generously and lavishly written; almost everything is implemented and written in vivid, eye-catching detail. As with other games using 'telescopic' observations, the parser remains a uniquely flexible tool to shift the PC's focus from objects distant both geographically and conceptually.
There are generous hints provided, but the writing gave clear enough hints to allow the reader to figure out what's going on. That brings us to another thing unique about this game: the reader has the responsibility to make the observations and deductions. Unlike many other mystery games, the game reveals nothing of the correct answer (i.e. whodunit), not in the form of a notebook, not in the form of a list of clues, leaving any explanation of the crime to the end. Shifting the responsibility to the reader to figure out what's going on invests the reader much more in the game.
As with other dog-PC games, this game remains lighthearted, even when the PC is recalling other characters' sordid details, and maintains a gentle sense of humour throughout. A comment about the ending is below, but overall, I found Toby's Nose a very charming and highly polished game, featuring excellent writing and a good use of the core mechanic.
(Spoiler - click to show)One might complain that the ending of Toby's Nose is a bit of a wall of text. One would not be wrong! However, this echoes the structure of the original Holmes stories - Doyle's idea of a resolution was quite often to have Holmes explain what he had been doing right under the reader's nose - so Groover is perhaps justified in this aspect.
In this game, you play as Sherlock Holmes' dog as you investigate a murder. The game features an innovative movement system based on Pacian's Castle of the Red Prince.
You explore a huge variety of locales with what seems like a hundred or more objects, but due to the system, it can be done quickly.
The one aspect of the game that initially turned me off is that it requires exhaustive search of all such objects. You have a single command to search them, but you have to repeat it over, and over, and over. It becomes like Where's Waldo.
However, as the story unfolded (using hints occasionally because I hurried through it in an hour), I became enthralled. This is a good mystery. As the author states, it is intended to be solved in your head, and not through gameplay mechanics (contrast this with the wonderful Infocom mystery Ballyhoo, where the focus is on solving puzzles to obtain more evidence, but a psychological element is still present).
I found the solution to be very logical and satisfying. I had two false accusations I was convinced of in the middle of the game before I realized I had missed crucial evidence.
Strongly recommended.
P.S. I was stuck at the very beginning because I did not understand the mechanic. You need to (Spoiler - click to show)smell nouns that appear in the descriptions of people, even if they are not present. So if someone smells like they went to a party, type SMELL PARTY, etc..
So much is accomplished here with about four verbs: smell, examine, bark, inventory. The PC is Sherlock's Holmes's faithful bloodhound Toby. And you're assisting Holmes to solve a murder by smelling various objects. On the face of it, this is a one-room game, but smelling something can evoke memories or scents relating to other locations in Toby's experience and you can thus traverse a wide array of very Victorian-British locales and social situations. The London that results is more Dickens-meets-Downton than Doyle, but it is rich and very detailed, providing commentary on nearly everything you can see, smell, and imagine. Groover has provided copious optional footnotes describing the various literary, IF, and pop-culture references in the game.
There's a sense in which the very limited verb-set in this game makes it seem somewhat choice-based. One could imagine re-creating it fairly completely in Twine. But Toby's Nose does a great job showing what the parser potentially does better. It demands an attention to detail (wholly appropriate in a Holmes mystery) that the clearly signaled hyperlinks in a Twine or other HIF story don't, and it permits actions that are off-script, which -- even though they're not necessary to complete the story -- add detail and background and humor that enriches the experience.
The story does tend to anthropomorphise Toby a bit, but it also doesn't forget that he's a dog. There's a wealth of (often funny) extra interactions and descriptive data built into the game to reinforce the canine perspective. Toby's smelling prowess also may seem a bit too impressive at times, but this can be forgiven as in service to a fantastic story. Toby's Nose is a truly impressive and accomplished piece of interactive fiction. Highly recommended.
Quick non-spoilery tip: it's possible to fairly easily brute force the solution to the mystery. (I did not solve it correctly on the first try or -- I'm ashamed to admit -- on the second try.) It may be helpful to know that the solution is obvious, not ambiguous, once you have all the requisite data. Don't cheat yourself by jumping the gun:)
Dogs have superior olfactory abilities, and this game simulates that. Scents have memories attached, and you can explore scent-memories and the entire world of a case and solve it from one room as Sherlock Holmes's dog. This is a great use of a "Castle of the Red Prince" style approach, which the author notes is intentional.
There's no time limit or pressure as Toby reviews scents and memories. The case can be solved by guessing right on the first turn, but definitely don't try that. I accused everyone *but* the right person. Well, I didn't accuse Holmes or Watson. Needless to say, great mystery, great game. Only a few tiny minor disambiguations to be expected (Spoiler - click to show)such as opium pipes and church organ pipes but nothing I found that ruined the game.