Fans of adventure games will not be surprised to learn that there is a post about the game Deadline in the near future of this blog. It’s a text adventure from the legendary writers and designers at the developer Infocom. Deadline was a major breakthrough and deserves its place in the pantheon. But it was not the first proper mystery game–that would be this. The game presents you with a murder to solve that has a predetermined solution and an actual story.
That’s quite an achievement given the technical limitations at play. It also sets itself apart from other text adventures of the time by attempting to present the illusion of a sophisticated parser that can understand full sentences. In fact, the in-game Sherlock to the player’s Watson, detective Lord Colin Drollery, begins to demand full sentences from the player to explain the evidence. Sadly, Chat-GPT was a few decades in the future at this point, so it comes nowhere close to being able to understand the vast majority of sentences. This game turned into a lot of me trying to communicate ideas in a way the computer will understand and getting an endless series of responses like “Don’t follow you, I’m afraid” and “Can’t follow you, old sport.”
On the other hand, sometimes it does understand relatively complex sentences. I’m inclined to agree with Renga in Blue that it must be driven by some kind of keyword recognition, because the technology just wasn’t there otherwise. There’s traces of magic here, though. The game is designed in such a way where some responses are ambiguous enough that you can abstract them to fit your own version of the story. For example, early in the game a character named Wormsly asks your profession. It doesn’t matter if you say “doctor” or “xylophonist,” he always says, “Oh, I see. Well.” This strikes me as a rather artful choice of response. It’s vague and open to interpretation, but more substantial than no response at all. What are we to take from that “Well.”? It suggests to me that he’s a bit flustered–like your answer wasn’t what he was expecting to hear. But there is no right answer.
The mystery at hand is easily the most sophisticated we’ve come across so far, but of course that’s not saying very much. Some things are still simplistic–there’s only one real suspect out of a whopping total of two characters (other than you, the deceased and Lord Colin.) But we are given a whole fully-fleshed out crime scene to play with and a series of clues that ultimately decisively prove the guilt of the grasping Mr. Blackwell, moved to kill his nephew Rodney to steal his winning lottery ticket. So Blackwell stages his suicide–classic crime fiction move. It ultimately proves crucial that Blackwell did this the morning Rodney’s body was discovered and not the night before, which is the story Blackwell’s trying to sell. If the game had more space this could have been fleshed out into a more complete game with multiple suspects and deeper layers, so we’ve still got a long way to go, but I’m satisfied with the creativity and detail of this scenario.
Another notable thing about this game? It takes like 45 minutes to play, tops. Even if you struggle with every challenge in the game, Lord Colin gets impatient quickly and just starts telling you the answers, and, mercifully, how to phrase them in just the right way. This isn’t a bad thing! To my eternal chagrin, the prevailing philosophy at this time among people making adventure games is that the more fiendishly difficult the better, because the player will get more bang for their buck and sink untold hours into trying to crack the puzzles. This seems to have worked for them, but as someone playing in 2024 with certain expectations of a game, if I encounter unsolvable puzzles and random deaths, I have thousands of other games to play that are more accessible. And, all parser wrestling aside, this game is actually quite accessible. Lord Colin’s not going to let you get stuck for too long, even if it means that the game is on rails.
Here’s the thing, though–according to old ads posted on MobyGames, this game retailed for $19.95, which in 2024 money is $75. If I paid that price for a game that has the length and content of a subpar episode of “Murder, She Wrote”, I would be irate, and I wouldn’t even have the Internet to go rant about it.
One final note: I was only able to play this game thanks to Renga Blue’s instructions, but I ran into an issue where the game would crash about 5 minutes in. In order to play the game successfully, use this link, which is just a backup copy of the game on the same emulation website that doesn’t have the fatal error.
Oryx & Cake Boss 