Late summer mysteries

Three mysteries... or games which are mystery-shaped, at least. Plus one which doesn't fit the theme but does fit the symmetry group.

• The Mermaid Mask
• This Bed We Made
• Cognition Method
• He Who Watches

The Mermaid Mask

• by SFB Games -- game site

The piratical Captain Mortuga lies dead in a locked room. On his piratical submarine. Luckily, the young substitute captain has summoned the dynamic duo of Grimoire and Sally to solve the crime!

This gets mentioned in "static deduction" genre lists, but it's actually not. It's a traditional mystery game. You interrogate suspects, search the mansion for clues, unlock a few locked doors, show every clue to every suspect, and eventually call everybody together in the Dining Room to Explain All. I mean, the mansion is a submarine and everybody was arguing in the Mess Hall before you barged in, but it's the same genre as Deadline or any millionth Sherlock Holmes game.

Which is not surprising, because The Mermaid Mask is third in a series that dates back to 2014. The second game shipped after Obra Dinn, but not by enough to redesign the whole game model, even if the designers had wanted to. And why would they? Nothing wrong with an old-fashioned locked-room mystery.

The game leans hard on its cast of characters. The ship has nine residents, counting the captain and the, er, ex-captain. All are involved in a tangled web of secrets and awkwardly concealed motives. You'll have to dig down through the layers to reach the one that got Mortuga's throat slit.

The voice-acting and animation are top-notch. The writing is... uneven. I liked the story; there's a lot of knotty and interesting stuff going on. But the writers seem to have gotten stuck in banter mode. Every little aside between Grimoire and Sally is mugging for a chuckle, and a 50% hit rate is not good enough for that sort of thing. Really, even if it were 100%, it would get samey.

An interesting side note: the game does a great job of having you play Grimoire-and-Sally. The truly dual protagonist is a bit of a rarity in videogames. Aside from one tutorial scene where Sally naps, you are never playing one character with the other as sidekick. It's always both.

(Or maybe neither? The gameplay isn't really about solving mysteries in the Holmesian sense. The game mostly asks you questions like "What piece of evidence shows X?" Then Grimoire-and-Sally narrate X. They're running the show; you manage the evidence files.)

(Oh jeez, you're playing the notebook. That's hilarious.)

The other problem is pacing. Post that tutorial chapter, you spend a huge chunk of the game walking around and collecting evidence. Oh, they throw in a few research questions and a sequence of puzzle boxes to tide you over, but mostly it's click everything and lawnmower the topic lists. Eight times over. (For the eight living characters.)

Once you've got most of the evidence, the game starts unlocking "suspicion" topics. That's how you pin down each suspect and solve their sub-case. This is where the game actually starts. But it takes you half the game to get there, and that first half is essentially all static dialogue. I seriously came close to uninstalling before I got to the mystery part.

The mystery part is more satisfactory. (Albeit in a police-procedural way, as I said.) It's not a difficult game. It's not trying to be; the game is generous with clues, and the UI is easy to brute-force if that's the way you want to tackle it. I'll be honest: I did a lot of brute-forcing. It was easier than trawling one half-rememebered snippet from the archived ocean of clue responses. But it's a perfectly good mystery yarn. Interwoven collection of mini-character-mysteries, I should say. With a big eerie mystery at the end.

I'm glad I gave it a try, but the format doesn't do it for me.

This Bed We Made

• by Lowbirth Games -- game site

A narrative game about investigation, but not police investigation or even private investigation. You are Sophie Roy, an overworked underpaid hotel maid. Thank heavens for social invisibility, though, because you are the most dedicated snoop in 1950s Montreal. Journals? Photos? Letters in locked jewelry cases? If it's in your hotel, it's fair game.

Today, however, something has Gone Wrong. The frame story doesn't hint at what, but the police are keen to hear everything you've learned. Time to flash back through your day on the fifth floor. But... maybe don't tell the police everything.

This reminded me a lot of Disappearance at Dahlia View. Poking around is the whole game. There are some light puzzles. Suitcase combination locks, torn-up notes, an extremely simple cipher. (Diegetically simple: it was invented by schoolkids.) If you're not sure of your current story goal, hit a key and Sophie will muse revealingly to herself. Really the biggest obstacle I faced was convincing myself that reading private mail isn't scary. Nobody will catch you in the act, at least not in real itme.

Your snooping isn't police-shaped like Ex-Detective Conway's, mind you. You will not be setting up card-and-string boards or fill-in-the-blanking crime reports. The game doesn't even reveal what the crime is until quite late. You're just putting together details of people's lives, aided by your co-conspirators behind the hotel desk.

This makes for a good comparison with Mermaid Mask. Both games are all about the gathering of info. But Mermaid Mask thinks it's a detective game. Secretly it wants you to rush through the gathering phase so you can get to the important crime-solving. This Bed knows it's a snoop game, so it concentrates on making the gathering phase a delightful and engaging story. I much prefer that approach.

That said, I did not solve the crime. That is, I got to the end of the story and I still don't know how got ed! I also got a rotten ending, although, to be fair, this is because I didn't pick up on the other core mechanic.

See, in addition to peeking at evidence, you have the option to destroy any piece of evidence. This isn't meaningful for most of the game. But after you leave the fifth floor for the last time, the police will arrive and tromp through all your carefully cleaned hotel rooms. Have you discovered anything that 1950s asshole cops might misread, or read in bad faith? Consider well before you push that elevator button.

I reloaded before that "won't have a chance to return" warning, did some prudent additional cleaning, and got a better story outcome. But still not a perfect one. And I still don't know how the crime got crimed.

Maybe this is just the way of choice-based games. This Bed does a fair amount of your-choices-matter (aka "Beth will remember that"). I could have just screwed myself early on. And then, as I freely admit, I'm bad at detective games which don't hold my hand.

But I'm not going to replay more than that last ending scene. I got happy endings for , , and . The last few puzzle pieces will just have to take care of themselves.

Cognition Method

• by Team Cognition -- game site

A mysterious geometric object has been found near Jupiter. The astronauts exploring it found mysterious geometric puzzles. Then they disappeared. One of them is your son.

This is a very enthusiastic puzzle game which is handicapped by being enthusiastic about things that we have seen an awful lot of. Gravity-shifting puzzles. Crates on plates. Brutalist archicture. Noneuclidean nightmare corridors created from your trauma. Sad Dad Astronaut.

None of these are bad schticks. I have loved all of these schticks individually, and they fit together no problem. But the result feels very by-the-numbers in narrative, environment, and puzzle design. You can pretty much call every Silent-Hillian door gimmick and every line of dialogue as they come out.

The only really new combination is "gravity puzzles" plus "massive brutalist spaces". There's fun moments when you enter a brain-meltingly vast space that makes you feel like a bug in a cathedral, and then you figure out how to send yourself flying to the top of the cathedral.

On the down side, some annoying platforming. Not difficult, but annoying.

For a puzzle game, it's not all that densely packed with puzzles. We've gotten used to the test-chamber pacing where every puzzle flings you straight into the next one. This isn't that. The world is spaced out with architecture and memory bubbles. Cognition Method wants you to absorb its monologues and its monolithic silence as you move through.

And, let's be fair, this is some high-quality monolithic silence. The game doesn't just slap one brut-concrete texture on giant cubes and call it a day. Every one of these spaces is different. Lighting, atmosphere, enclosure. Little decorative features of water or ivy. Some spaces are oppressive; others are liberating. Indoors, outdoors. Elements are echoed and rearranged. It's poetically done.

Overall, a nice architecture tour paced with weak dialogue and a modest number of modestly fun but not mindblowing puzzles. Cognition Method is successful at what it does, but it's got a lot of competition.

He Who Watches

• by Bobby Vanden -- game site

I haven't finished this one. In fact I've barely gotten to the meat of the game. But I mention it because it's running the same notional dogpark as Cognition Method. You got your crates, your plates, and your gravity shifts. But it's a very different set of design choices.

He Who Watches runs firmly on the test chamber model. You literally teleport from one puzzle to the next. The spaces are functional, and some of them are imposing, but there's no pretense of atmosphere or architectural beauty.

(Not in the main body of the game, I should say. A very brief opening scene lets you traverse an outdoor mountain path. That's good setup. I wouldn't be surprised if the late game goes somewhere mind-expandingly cool. But for now, I'm looking at acres of test-chamber tiles.)

As for narrative, I've gotten about one line so far. Solve puzzles for the puzzle god to become the puzzle god. Probably. Again, we might get more later on.

No, this is a puzzle game pure and simple, and it goes hard on them. I am definitely getting a workout.

Some of this is the mechanics, which are really not intuitive at all. Your tool is a bow-and-chain-arrow with a peculiarly rigid chain. The gravity rules let you shift around any inside angle, but no outside angle. No jumps either, not even hopping down off a cube. This makes for extremely persnickety navigation.

But I can't deny that these mechanics are productive as heck. Every puzzle has a distinct Neat Idea, all built on the basic mechanics. Just to show off (and to provide oft-needed boosts), the game uses the "insight" hint model: every room lets you peek at an easier puzzle using the same trick. (I think Can of Wormholes did this first?) So you know the designer had something specific in mind. I'm dozens of puzzles in and there's no sign that they're running out of ideas.

The puzzles alternate between self-contained rooms (the aim is always to reach the exit) and larger complex chambers, which offer more entangled multi-step challenges. The steps are unlocked by solving the small puzzles, but then you have to figure out how to get around. Everything is organized around a rather alchemical-looking symbolic map. I look forward to finding out more about that.

You want secrets? You got secrets. I don't got secrets -- yet! I can definitely see where some secrets must be hiding. I look forward to getting into more of those, too.

Anyway, this is just to say that I am eating the plums that are locked in the gravity-shifting puzzle box. Cognition Method had the visual and environmental juice, but He Who Watches is sweet and delicious.