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What I'm Working On (Patreon)

Published:
2017-08-21 11:42:47
Imported:
2020-07

Content

Hey everyone!

I've been crunching hard on a video for the last few weeks, but it's finally coming together and I wanted to share some progress with you all - and maybe get some ideas in the process.

So, one of the videos I've wanted to do ever since the channel first started was a look at detective games. I've always been a bit disappointed with games like LA Noire for being so simple and streamlined in many aspects, and so wanted to look at some games that offered slightly more interesting and involving mechanics.

This has obviously meant a lot of research, and so I've played and captured a lot of games for this video. Including but not limited to:

The Trace, Detective Grimoire, Sherlock Holmes: Crime and Punishment, Sherlock Holmes: The Devil's Daughter, The Shivah, Gemini Rue, Blackwell, Blade Runner, Mean Streets, Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective, LA Noire, The ABC murders, Return of the Obra Dinn, Deadline, Papers Please, Ace Attorney Investigations, Discworld Noir, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, KGB, Ace Attorney, Nancy Drew: Shadow at the Water's Edge, Condemned, Analogue: A Hate Story, Gone Home, Her Story, Eagle Eye Mysteries, Contradiction, Murdered Soul Suspect, Police Quest 4, The Raven, Assassin's Creed's Deadly Crimes DLC, The Wolf Among Us, and Batman Arkham Knight.

Phew! I have been busy! (Not all the games will show up in the video. Many were simply for research but I decided that they're not that interesting).

For the video I will be using a movie (Mystic River, if you wanna watch it before the video comes out and avoid spoilers. It's on Amazon Prime) to show how a fictional crime is solved, and find four major detective mechanics from the film (gathering evidence, questioning witnesses, following leads, and making deductions) so I can track down video game parallels.

The idea is to almost make a composite game, using ideas from loads of different games. Ace Attorney's testimonies, Ethan Carter's timelines, The Shivah's search bar, and so on.

This is proper bread and butter GMTK stuff. The sort of video this channel really started on: gathering good design from loads and loads of games, from indie to mobile to DOS classics and so on. (See: climbing, health, death videos, etc).

Uhm! Yeah, I dunno. I guess if there's something from a game that you think is especially good then shout it out. I think I've covered everything I need at this point but can't help to be thorough. What game has most made you feel like a detective? Has a game ever given you that Eureka moment? Feel free to be vague if you want to avoid spoilers and I'll either Google it or ask you in DM.

Other than that, I've also been thinking about a new video series where I look at how a game series changed over time. So kinda like the Dead Space videos, but all wrapped up in a single episode. These will take forever to make (as in, I'll play the games while working on other stuff and then finally make the video like a month later when I'm done), but could prove to be popular. So just watch this space on that one.

I'm also starting work on the next ep of Boss Keys, and I've started streaming more often. Looking to maybe do a show every week on Tuesday? Don't want to commit to anything until I'm sure. I tested YouTube and Twitch streaming but reckon I'll go for YouTube because my audience is there.

Only other update is that Jordan has all the questions and will give me the answers as soon as he can.

CHEERIO!

Mark

Comments

Anonymous

Not that it's *quite* the same, but there were times in Broken Sword where I couldn't quite work out where next to go or what to do, but I don't know if that was me not being savvy on clues from character dialogue or the game not making it more understandable.

Anonymous

I have to say that Her Story made a very strong impression upon me. It literally had me writing notes with pen and paper and FORCED me to be observant, to remember key words, and to piece the whole puzzle together. I played it one when it come out, and then again at the start of the year. On the second playthrough (which I thought was going to be boring because I 'knew' what the outcome was), I was shocked to view four video clips I didnt watch before, and they all contained key points that contradicted my original conclusion. I really felt like a real detective :)

Anonymous

Yesssssss! I'd love something that too there clever puzzles from the Nancy Drew games and made a proper mystery out of it! Those games were a big part of my childhood.

Anonymous

Might be worth checking out Subsurface Circular (the surprise new Mike Bithell game). it's ostensibly about being a robot detective, though it ends up being a pretty linear, mostly traditional visual novel. Still, there are some neat ideas in there (the focus points system is pretty cool), and it's a short, enjoyable experience either way. looking forward to the video!

Anonymous

Wow, great collection of games. The only thing missing is Witcher 3. I'm a huge fan of noir stories (Dresden, Jack Reacher, Sue Grafton, etc); and Witcher 3 strikes that noir/detective chord for me. To support my claim, Extra Creditz did a video about how Witcher 3 is the best detective game ever made: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkIKbTiuJ9A" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkIKbTiuJ9A</a>

Anonymous

Blues and Bullets EP1 had quite nice crime scene investigation sequence with gathering evidence and connecting it together, it was still pretty straightforward, but fun.

Anonymous

A game I noticed missing from your list is Danganronpa. Similarly to Ace Attorney you gather evidence and speak to witnesses to try and solve murders, and it all comes together in a trial situation to bring to light who the killer was. Might be worth a look. I'm not sure if it'll provide anything new you've not seen in that list already, but it's still a very enjoyable game all the same.

Anonymous

I used to play Maupiti Island on Atari ST as a boy. You were free to roam through the island (a bunch of hand drawn static screens interactive with point &amp; click), interrogate characters (it had speech synthesis, quite revolutionary at the time!) and try to piece the story together. Quite a hardcore detective game, but pretty novel at the time, and I haven't seen anything like it since! This blog describes nicely how the game plays: <a href="https://advgamer.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/maupiti-island-game-mechanics.html" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://advgamer.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/maupiti-island-game-mechanics.html</a>

Anonymous

I think Layton Brothers: Mystery Room had a lot of good ideas. For some reason it seems like nobody ever talks about it, probably because it's nothing like the other Layton games and it's only on iOS and Android. The first thing it does (after introducing the characters) is drop you into a 3d view of the crime scene and give you 5 minutes to search for clues. The clues are called out with little icons, but you still have to comb the scene to find all of them. Then it asks you to use your "gut feeling" to select which suspect you think did it - before any interrogation or story twists. From there it goes like a more traditional VN style detective game where you question suspects, find contradicting evidence, and... answer multiple choice questions about the crime. It doesn't break free from those conventions, but the writing is good and it really made me feel like a detective more than a Phoenix Wright game, for instance. There's also a great fake-out moment in the first case that clues the player in to the tone of the game and how "realistic" they should expect the crimes to be. It's relatively cheap, the music and art is great too.

Anonymous

Hey Mark. An Episode on detective games sounds interesting. You seem to have it pretty much covered. And yes, I hated L.A. Noire for making so little of the premise. It was just no fun at all and all you had to do was analyzing the award winning facial expressions. No matter how bad you were at this, the story moved on, leaving you as a bored spectator. However I would like to make a suggestion for another aspect. I noticed that there are some games that make me feel like a detective without having any detective-mechanics. And that is piecing together a mystery in my head even though my character has other things to do. The Fullbright games Gone Home and recently Tacoma are great at this: They urge you to think about what might have happened. As it turned out, I was thinking in narrative stereotypes, because I am so used to them in games. But in both cases these thoughts are just red herrings (and great ones since they only form in the player’s head, not in the actual game) and in the end you feel a little dumb. I also caught myself criticizing the games for being obvious or bland before I reached the end that proved me wrong. Another game series that is great at this is Zero Escape. It always supplies you with enough information to be hooked and to feel clever for figuring it out but holds enough back to pull out the rug from underneath your feet. All those games make you feel clever and dumb at the same time. Those are clearly not detective games, but the put the player in the position of trying to figure the mystery out. And because they are not books but games you can do something about it. Even though they are two walking simulators and one series of visual novels with little to no gameplay mechanics you are pulled into the middle of things. Maybe this is a bit peripheral for your topic and maybe I just hope for an episode about how walking simulators and visual novels can use the medium of games for their advantage and not just be a digital book. I loved how Heavy Rain played with player’s preconceptions and used gaming mechanics to mirror the feelings and needs of the protagonists so the player and the character became one. One example: You are so trained in reacting to QTEs that you just instantly push a button that is presented. Well if you do, you will shoot an innocent person when he reaches into his pocket. The character is afraid that he has a gun and shoots. The player is used to reacting to QTEs and pushes. This is incredible. But that is definitely taking it too far away from your topic.

Gareth Clarke

It's been a few years since I played Hotel Dusk and its sequel Last Window, but I remember them being masterclasses of atmosphere. I don't think they do much new, though as DS titles they were rarities in using a portrait orientation where you held the DS itself almost like a detective notebook.

Anonymous

Observer recently came out to pretty strong reviews. Haven't played it myself, but it's timely and Blade Runner esque.

Anonymous

Heavy rain is a good example of a detective game told from multiple perspectives rather than a single main character. Without trying to spoil anything, one of the characters is actually a detective which has really literal translations of most of the things you picked out as detective mechanics. The rest of the characters probably lean too close to just playing out a story but they all go about detective behaviours as the plot progresses, but the branching narrative scheme could be interesting to talk about. Does the player need to solve the mystery? Can they fail? What happens if they miss a clue? Can the player reach a soft fail (can't solve the mystery but can continue play) before the finish of the game and should the player be notified?

Anonymous

Looking at modern games, Sexy Brutale by the looks of it seems to have some interesting detective mechanics, though I have yet to get to it. The game that made me feel the most "detectivy" was probably the first Gabriel Knight and the Broken Sword series, though those are mostly regular adventure games using detective story as the flavor. In that sense many HOPAs from Artifex Mundi are detective stories as well, e.g. Enigmatis 2 (I'll let you in on a secret - HOPAs are secretly just slightly simpler adventure games). Blade Runner was of course the great detective game and the ESPER and Voight-Kampff tests are some of the most memorable mechanics I've seen, though I have some doubts whether I would enjoy such a game today the same way I enjoyed it when I was 17. There have also been a number of supernatural horror detective games, often set in Lovecraftian settings, though I am not sure if this is relevant wrt this episode.

Anonymous

I definitely felt like a detective as a kid when I played "Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?". Maybe you know it already? <a href="https://youtu.be/dL-13NZAXuE" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://youtu.be/dL-13NZAXuE</a>

Anonymous

Always considered Mystic River an extremely underrated movie (in the public consciousness; the critics liked it well enough). Really looking forward to see what you do with it.

Anonymous

I'd definitely recommend Westerado, from a mechanics standpoint! Procedurally (well, they do call them *procedurals*) generating characters to make a replayable murder investigation is pretty interesting: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyCVFIz2WGE" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyCVFIz2WGE</a>In that same vein, I'd also recommend logic puzzles when it comes to making deductions (as shown by this website, these too can be procedurally generated, I imagine). You could say that the clue sentences are "evidence" (provided in advance in a logic puzzle, as the game focuses on the deduction portion of the detective experience). <a href="http://www.logic-puzzles.org/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://www.logic-puzzles.org/</a>

Anonymous
>>6797655

I just remembered - Prisoner of Ice was one of those Cthulhu flavoured adventure games, that at least to me felt like a supernatural detective story. I remember it was a bit irritating since unlike e.g. Lucas Arts adventure games, it had a tendency to kill you without warning, so I resorted to playing large parts of it with a walkthrough. In retrospect I am wondering would it even be possible to make a Lucas Arts style no dying adventure game that would stay true to the Lovecraftian horror style?

Aadit Doshi

Heavy rain and its Augmented reality interface was pretty cool, the searching for clues was a little dry, but they way you could combine information was pretty good.

Anonymous

I haven't played Arkham Knight, but if you've played Arkham Origins it might be worth touching on how the "detective" segments don't actually make you, the player, feel like much of a detective. As I recall, it's really just about finding the necessary interactive object to scan, and then watching Batman turn that "clue" into a flashback of how the crime took place.

Anonymous

One of the many thing I love about Her Story is how the story doesn't have an "END". The game ends when you feel satisfied with the answers you have, the details you worked out. That is what made me feel like a real world detective.

Anonymous

Have you seen Extra Credits video in the Witcher 3 being the best detective game as of late? <a href="https://youtu.be/XkIKbTiuJ9A" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://youtu.be/XkIKbTiuJ9A</a>

Anonymous
>>6797800

Yep, that was the first one I thought of as well, though I think there was something more recent that did, too, but I can't put my finger on it.

Anonymous

On the topic of mechanics, Craig Perko highlighted the "big board of evidence" in Life is Strange as an exemplary design compared to how "evidence assembly" is often handled (e.g. in Ace Attorney), presenting all clues as physical items to be manipulated and helping to align the knowledge and deductive processes of the PC and the player. YMMV.

Anonymous

I liked how in Blade Runner you could change where the story was headed simply by interacting with certain objects. The game might have been nudging you in one direction but you can do away with those options without even knowing it. The voight kampff minigame gives the players a lot of agency too. Your not mining a person for information but trying to coax an emotional response out of them. And how extreme the question you wish to ask is always up to you with consequences in toe.

Anonymous

I wonder if Ghost Trick can be considered a detective game, since Ace Attorney is here. Maybe more a Puzzle Game since you don't actually have to go search for clues.

Anonymous

The way the characters' schedule is used in Deadly Premonition gave me a detective vibe. Also Deux Ex Human Revolution and all the interesting storyline you could find while passing through a random appartment and looking at a PC that you could en up a lot like following a lead because nothing would appear on you missions log. Same for the need to write the access codes. I always thought a good detective game would need you to write things down in a notebook.

Anonymous

As a kid, I loved all the professor Layton games. Going through solving puzzles and getting more information on the story was incredibly fun, and it made me feel like I really needed to work to proceed further in the story.