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mystery games and inventory puzzles
To not seem like an dinosaur yearning for parser (and i only yearn for graphical adventures with parser more, knowing how good parsers interactive fiction engines have theese days) and being ok with deaths in games, i put forward question that is hopefully more progressive. Do mystery games with lot of dialog and locations that open up to player along the game, really need many inventory puzzles? (Especially games that are long.)
Depends on the synergy between the kind of inventory puzzle and the mystery tale, I’d think. I mean, Ace Attorney is mostly a series of the exact same inventory puzzle (use specific item on the right spot), but highly contextual and one that makes absolutely sense for the genre. Games like Broken Sword, where the ‘detective’ needs to improvise on the spot to allow them to continue the investigation work for that type of story too.
Trick DS (on the DS, obviously) had an interesting ‘inventory’ puzzle system too, where you needed to combine different types of clues (‘inventory item’) together to generate hypotheses, which you would try to defend in verbal confrontations. So you’d make a combination of items, circumstances, location and persons (all which were available as “items” in your records/“inventory). Sometimes, you’d get the right solution, sometimes you’d get a bogus solution, and sometimes you’d get the “it won’t budge”-type of message. But it was basically an inventory puzzle.
“Rationality, that was it. No esoteric mumbo jumbo could fool that fellow. Lord, no! His two feet were planted solidly on God’s good earth” - Ellery Queen, The Lamp of God
Trick DS (on the DS, obviously) had an interesting ‘inventory’ puzzle system too, where you needed to combine different types of clues (‘inventory item’) together to generate hypotheses, which you would try to defend in verbal confrontations. So you’d make a combination of items, circumstances, location and persons (all which were available as “items” in your records/“inventory). Sometimes, you’d get the right solution, sometimes you’d get a bogus solution, and sometimes you’d get the “it won’t budge”-type of message. But it was basically an inventory puzzle.
Never heard of this game. Got a link? Sounds like the deduction boards in the recent Sherlock Holmes games.
NP: A Link Between Worlds, Beneath a Steel Sky and Vampyr
http://www.konami.jp/trick/about/index.html
It’s a game based on the hit Japanese TV drama mystery series Trick, so there’s no overseas release. It was released back in 2010 I think. It’s pretty decent as a mystery game capturing the atmosphere of the series perfectly, but it’s incredibly short. Like probably shorter than Another Code short.
“Rationality, that was it. No esoteric mumbo jumbo could fool that fellow. Lord, no! His two feet were planted solidly on God’s good earth” - Ellery Queen, The Lamp of God
That sounds great!
http://www.konami.jp/trick/about/index.html
It’s a game based on the hit Japanese TV drama mystery series Trick, so there’s no overseas release.
so there’s no overseas release.
no overseas release.
To bad. I keep wondering why the games based on Kindaichi isn’t released over here and was hoping this could be a good substitute.
NP: A Link Between Worlds, Beneath a Steel Sky and Vampyr
To bad. I keep wondering why the games based on Kindaichi isn’t released over here and was hoping this could be a good substitute.
Well, the only (young) Kindaichi games that ever had any chance of localization were the two on the DS (as the manga hadn’t been translated yet during the GBC/PSX/Saturn days) , and the standalone one, developed by Tomcat, was awful, so you’re not missing out on anything. The Detective Conan & The Young Kindaichi Case Files game on the other hand was pretty good, and features a story written by Danganronpa’s Kodaka (he started his career in gaming as a scenario writer for hire). There’s a fan translation of the crossover, I think.
The PSX/Saturn one where you play as the murderer is absolutely brilliant though; it’s a novel game where you need to pull of the perfect crime, as Hajime will expose your crimes if you carelessly leave clues around.
And then there are the two From Software (Dark Souls) games of the original Kosuke Kindaichi novels on the DS, but they probably never had any chance of a localization (partly because they’re rather faithful adaptations of the original books which are super famous in Japan, but hardly known here).
“Rationality, that was it. No esoteric mumbo jumbo could fool that fellow. Lord, no! His two feet were planted solidly on God’s good earth” - Ellery Queen, The Lamp of God
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