BEST DETECTIVE GAMES FOR PC SERIES

If your taste runs to longer pieces, you're in luck. If you like it, Victorian Detective 2, Victorian Detective 3, and Victorian Detective Interlude also await your deductive skills. Where Death off the Cuff is making fun of Poirot, Victorian Detective is straightforwardly glorying in the tropiest possible Holmes. There's no option to lawnmower through your evidence inventory here. In contrast with a Phoenix Wright game, the player is only expected to deal with a small amount of evidence at a time, so your odds of finding the right option are pretty good but the story keeps moving forward even if you fail. Each step of the mystery poses its own tiny puzzle of logic, inviting the player to put together evidence from examining different items.ДЄt the same time, the choice-based setup provides enough structure that the player has a reasonable chance of reaching the deduction the game is looking for. The narrator is endowed with implausibly strong observational skills - at one point in Victorian Detective, you identify the cat breeds of some cats who left hairs on a man you had run past the night before.

BEST DETECTIVE GAMES FOR PC SERIES

The prose doesn't read like Doyle.ДЄnd yet the series has a following, and it's not too hard to see why. There are illustrations, but they're hand-drawn and not particularly well-scanned. The production values are pretty rough-and-ready: the text often backtracks and reprints a description or partial scene you've already encountered. Victorian Detective (Peter Carlson, Quest) is the first in a series of Sherlock Holmes-style mysteries in which you check out crime scenes, then say what conclusion you've reached. It is, of course, partly a joke at the expense of unrealistic Poirot scenarios, but it makes its point interactively, a quick-playing good time. The only problem is that you have no idea who is actually guilty.Дeath off the Cuff is a tight little one-room game in which you have to prod the various characters into giving themselves away, so that you can swoop in and announce your deduction. You've gathered the suspects in one room (as you do) to announce the culprit. You're famous French detective Antoine Saint Germain. If you enjoy this piece, some of Huang's other pieces might also appeal to you: he's recently released Music, Mustard, and Murder, a short story's-worth of post-WWI logic solving suitable for Christie and Sayers fans.Дeath off the Cuff (Simon Christiansen, Inform). Personally I found that about three plays was enough to get the hang of the system. It's possible to fail to assemble a good case on the first playthrough and let the murderer slip through the replayability means that you can have a second try that is not simply a dull rehash of the first. An Act of Murder is a notable exception, though: in a classic isolated-house mystery, the characters, means, and motives are reshuffled on each playthrough. This is harder to do than it sounds, and most projects in this area never actually come to fruition. One of the consistently suggested ideas in IF is the mystery where the murderer and method are randomized at the beginning of play, so you can go through again and again. So if you have a taste for classic whodunnit genres rendered interactive, here are some highlights dating from 1995 to 2016.ДЄn Act of Murder (Christopher Huang as 'Hugh Dunnett').

(In fact, here's Mattie Brice on why murder mystery writing can teach us about narrative game design in general.) So many classic mysteries are essentially logic problems in fancy dress, so it's not a great stretch to do the same thing in game form. Locks, ciphers, and other standard puzzles feel at home in the genre. The focus of the story is usually firmly on past rather than present events. The mystery is a natural fit for interactive fiction. But I suppose my parents figured it wouldn't do me any harm, and it left me with a long-term affection for interactive mysteries. With a plot that turned on embezzlement and unfaithfulness, not to mention a fiendishly unforgiving set of scheduling puzzles, this is not the game I myself would recommend for a six-year-old. The first piece of interactive fiction I ever played was Infocom's locked-room murder mystery Deadline.

Best detective games for pc