The investigative genre is notoriously hard to implement as a video game. Any detective story must necessarily be written by the designers in advance, so how to meaningfully use deduction as a gameplay mechanic? One way is to constrain the scope of the investigation in a specific way so that the game can easily verify if the player is correct. This is how the excellent Return of the Obra Dinn does it. I thought I’d see how this game about a murder investigation set in a very strange world did it. Unfortunately while the story is well-written, with multiple suspects and lines of investigation, the mechanics are nothing special. It’s all about thoroughly exploring every nook and cranny of the island to collect all the clues. I enjoyed the world and the storyline but it doesn’t feel like a true investigative game to me.
The game takes place in a pocket universe ruled by the Syndicate, worshippers of dead alien gods who are granted immortality. They kidnap humans from the real world to populate their fief and continually strive against the equally alien demons. Their little societies are imperfect however and continually fail. When that happens, they ritually slaughter all of the mortal citizens and move to a new iteration of the island. They are on the verge of one such planned move when the entire ruling Council is murdered. In response, the move is put on hold and Lady Love Dies, the Syndicate detective who has been in exile for being deceived by a demon, is summoned to solve the case. At the point, all of the citizens have already been sacrificed and most of the Syndicate members have already moved to the new version of the island. There is already an obvious suspect in the form of a citizen who has a previous history of being possessed by a demon but needless to say the evidence against him is a little too neat. Lady Love Dies must then roam across the nearly deserted island to collect clues, interview those Syndicate members who remain and with the help of her laptop Starlight figure out what really happened.
The game’s graphics are rather blocky and indeed the characters aren’t even represented by 3D models as they are merely 2D cutouts. But the island really is a fairly expansive 3D space in which you are free to run, jump and crawl all over. The somewhat cartoonish and weird look put me off engaging seriously with it for a bit as I was tempted to treat it like an adventure game that is more on rails. But once I realized how big the island is, understood a bit more of the lore behind the Syndicate and saw that it’s a real place with everything laid out according to its own in-game logic, I had no difficulty buying into it. The vibes are indeed excellent, with its music, the strange relics you can find and the people you can talk to. Soon enough, you’ll know the island like the back of your hand as you zoom all over the place like a loon, double-jumping and zooming and climbing in order to explore every hidden corner and return for repeat interviews with the suspects as more information is revealed.
My main beef with the game is that very little deduction is needed on the player’s part. Sometimes a character might say something and you’ll decide that it’s a good idea to go searching at some particular part of the island. But you’ll soon realize that the game wants you to look everywhere and rewards you for it. The basic currency used here are blood crystals which can be spent to buy some clues, unlock some upgrades and mostly enable fast travel. You get them simply by thoroughly exploring the map, be that checking behind every corner, opening containers, finding a way to climb to the roofs of buildings, and many other maneuvers that make this feel at times like a platformer. The relics you can also find provide a bit of extra lore and on a few occasions, you can even come across vital clues that matter to the investigation this way. Do you like picking up every collectible off of a map? If so, you’ll love this. Otherwise, this may get infuriating. Once you get the clues, Starlight will nicely keep track of them and come up with the correct conclusions. No deduction required. The laptop will even tell you when two suspects are giving conflicting statements. All that is needed of the player is to go out and collect the data.
That said, you are in no way required to uncover every secret and find every clue to complete the game. You can even start the trial right at the beginning and immediately get to an ending. But most players will want to know as much as possible about the truth of what really happened or else what’s the point of playing the game? The writing is quite good and as you slowly realize what it is the Syndicate is really about, there’s a slow sense of mounting horror. The perfect society that they are trying to build is fascist and evil and Lady Love Dies, being a member of the Syndicate herself, is very much a part of it all. It’s probably not much of a spoiler to say that every one of the members still on the island is guilty of something and by their rules, the penalty for any infraction is death. So even Lady Love Dies have uncovered the entire truth, it’s still up to the player to frame the evidence in such a way to punish some and spare others. And if you really want to, you can even get everyone killed just because that’s what the Syndicate deserves.
All in all, I was impressed by the worldbuilding and the writing for the characters and how all of the little clues build up to form a complete picture of what happened. The atmosphere is fantastic and it does feel like an investigative game. Yet its gameplay mechanics aren’t about deduction at all and I dislike how most of your playing time really consists of frantically exploring every last bit of the island for fear of missing out of something critically important. There’s very little in the way of instructions so the expectation is that the player will experiment and try everything. So it’s only by trying weird things that you find out how to get the movement boosts and the Starlight upgrades. This means that I like that this game exists and I love the crazy setting but I’m not a big fan of the actual gameplay if that makes sense. Anyway it doesn’t take very long at all to finish the game even if you try hard to get all the clues so it does have that going for it. Of course I’m still not crazy enough to get 100% completion on all collectibles.
