Great Detective Games Let You Fail Miserably – Extra Punctuation

There are any number of wildly different games that one could argue are detective games, from Tex Murphy to LA Noire to Jack the Ripper on the Commodore 64, but the way I define them is that they’re a lot like classic adventure games except instead of hunting around for inventory items to combine until you can unlock the door that leads out of the escape room, you instead hunt around for pieces of information that you combine to help deduce a sequence of events. In order to unlock the door of your own intelligence. It’s like inventory puzzles but the items are facts and the inventory is your big clever brain.

This is usually applied in gameplay in the form of some kind of quiz. Maybe there’ll be a little form where you have to put the correct answers in or you have to pick the correct answer from a few dialogue options. And when I put it like that it sounds a bit lame, doesn’t it, like a school comprehension test, but it can be done well and it can be done very badly. Done well, it’s that rare thing in games: an actual test of logic and reasoning skills and I relish the feeling of cleverness that comes from solving it. Done poorly, it’s just another kind of game that lets you mindlessly brute force through it like a roomful of space monsters with guns.

So, what’s a good detective game RETURN OF THE OBRA DINN oh thank god. I’d gone almost two hours without praising Return of the Obra Dinn, I doubt I could have held it in much longer. Lucas Pope’s wonderful maritime mystery where the central gameplay task is to fill out an insurance form. But I love that about it, I love that it frontloads the mechanics of the puzzle and pieces out the story in little nuggets for you to mentally piece together in the background. It illustrates that detective games are really good for storytelling because their function basically demands that the player pay attention to every slightest detail. So the story can be absorbing in spite of being told through single moments playing out without context in random order.

It’s the simplicity I admire. It tells you just enough to let you fill in the rest of the blanks. Which is in stark contrast to what I’m about to cite as a bad example of a detective game: LA Noire, just about the only example of a detective game in the modern era of the triple A space. LA Noire had the typical triple A problem in that it’s main objective was to be spectacular and make sure the player saw the spectacular bits. So its cases focussed on cinematic moments and players were somewhat handheld through the information gathering. In the crime scenes the main character would walk straight past fifty cigarette butts to zero in on the one relevant one.

The focus was more on interrogating characters and picking on them they looked like they were lying, and the problem wasthey always did, because they were acting. So in fact you were going on how badly they were acting at any given moment. And even if you did fuck up all the interrogations, the game would find a way to railroad you to a climax anyway, ‘cos it’d be a shame if you missed something they’d worked so hard on. In the end LA Noire’s cases didn’t make me feel clever because success seemed to hinge more on correctly guessing when to believe and when to doubt rather than how well you’d interpreted the facts.

See, the key to making a detective game fun to puzzle out is that you have to give the player as many opportunities as possible to be wrong. If you steer them through finding the clues and give away the answer anyway then they can never be wrong. If you give them three dialog options to pick from then it’s pretty easily brute forced. Meanwhile, Obra Dinn has you fill in multiple blanks that all have multiple possible entries, and there could be hundreds if not thousands of wrong combinations. And you can’t brute force that, your only recourse is to actually be smart enough to figure it out.

If detective games have a weakness, it’s replayability. Or complete lack of same. The full impact of the “aha” moment of deducing the truth behind a mystery or logic puzzle absolutely cannot be had more than once if the answer never changes. You could try waiting until you forget everything, helping the process along with alcohol and head injuries. Or get someone else to play it for the first time and try to vicariously live through them. Giving cheeky hints every time they look stuck.

But there is another way to make detective games replayable that I’ve observed in more than one game in recent years. Two games. I’ve observed it in two games. Which you’ll grant me is more than one. It’s something I’ve decided to call “the choices matter detective game.” How it works is, there’s a mystery, there’s multiple possible solutions to it, the player picks one that they think is correct, and then the game… never tells them if they were. This happens in Pentiment, Obsidian’s medieval multiple murder mystery where there’s four suspects for the first case and you finger whichever one you like and then they get executed and you never get told if you picked right. All of them COULD have done it, and it hardly matters ‘cos nothing much changes other than who’s absent in later parts of the game and some dialogue here and there. Same thing happens in Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One by Frogwares. Every case has two possible interpretations of the facts, you pick one, and the game goes “Hm, that certainly is A plausible explanation. Welp, see you later.”

Honestly I don’t know how to feel about this. On the one hand, yes, the reason why games like Obra Dinn aren’t very replayable is because at the end the case is closed and you can stop thinking about it, and if the game doesn’t close the case properly then theoretically you can keep thinking about it. You can agonize over whether or not you made the right decision and it’s very much in line with my philosophy that interactive narrative helps us explore new, hitherto unknown ways of appreciating story. Does a murder mystery have to end with the mystery being answered? That’s a perfectly valid question to ask in this brave new world.

But then again, “yes it bloody well does” is also a perfectly valid answer to that question. Without the reveal at the end how am I going to feel clever for figuring it out? Which is, as established earlier, the whole reason I like playing detective games. Sure, maybe I shouldn’t have made assumptions. Pentiment isn’t really setting out to be a detective puzzle game, it’s more an exploration of setting and characters, but then again, again, can I really be blamed for going into a game centrally about a murder investigation, with the expectation that I will get to solve a murder investigation?

So the problem of making repeating gameplay that can continually create the “aha” moment of solving a mystery, remains. Could one procedurally generate a detective puzzler? I attempted something like that in my Lovecrafty roguelike game, The Consuming Shadow, which I increasingly feel I should remake at some point with less dogshit graphics, in which you had to deduce the identity of a Lovecraftian god by collecting clues from dungeons, but that was less about deduction as it was about eliminating possibilities until only one remained, like those logic puzzles that go “Mary, Bob, Steve and Alice are standing in a line, if Mary is on one of the ends and Bob is not standing next to a woman, how old is Alice’s cat?” Not really the same thing.

I suppose the only recourse left is to just hope they bring out another one. I mean, you watch an episode of Jonathan Creek and it’s not so bad that the mystery’s been solved now because you could always watch another episode of Jonathan Creek you haven’t seen yet. Kicking the can down the road, perhaps, but you know what, if Lucas Pope put out a new game every year that had the exact same puzzle structure as Obra Dinn but a different story and setting I’d definitely subscribe to that service. I mean, the New York Times gets away with putting out a new crossword every day without mixing up the gameplay mechanics.