Adventure Gamers - Forums

You have some games that are all about the desk work although not really typical adventure detective games.
Her Story about looking in past video evidence with keywords
Orwell about investigating social media.
Papers, Please that it’s about being a border crossing immigration officer.

Detective games are my favorite in the whole world. I’ve played all the Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christies, Face Noir, Art of Murder, Sinking Island,etc. I’ve been on a retro kick lately so I’m getting ready to replay Post Mordem and Still Life 1&2. I hope they’re as good now as the memory.

But the best one for me was the Black Watchmen. I played the first season with a friend and about half of the second season until RL got in the way. It has all of the tasks, “copying files, comparing pictures or notes, uploading data to the main frame, analyzing prints or hand writing, finding location on maps”, you mentioned and more like analyzing sound files and solving riddles based on legends and myths. I think I must have been a researcher in a happy past life because I loved it. For anyone who hasn’t played it, the Black Watchmen is not a standard murder mystery investigated by a detective but investigation is the primary gameplay. In the game, you’re a secret agent given a mission and you have to unravel the clues. The game does take it even further with real life (like away from your computer and out on the real streets) missions but I didn’t go that far. My husband already thinks I’m crazy with my games and I’d rather not prove him right. This game is an ARG and the devs really did do a great job of setting up an alternate universe with a ton of website, email addresses and social media sites. It’s not a perfect game, they kind of lost control of the story toward the end, but more fun and less juicy than puppies and as satisfying a game as any I’ve ever played. Some of the missions were quite short and easy. Others took hours and made me sweat blood. It was great to play with a friend, comparing notes and giving each other support or a nudge when needed.

I think any detective or secret agent would have loved the “Ah ha!” moments. I nearly broke my arm patting myself on the back.

I agree detective games also are one of my favorite sub genres of adventure games, from gabriel knight, to blade runner, even a game like broke sword dabbles in the detective genre, especially at the beginning. Even the cheeky over acted ones charm the pants off me like contradiction.

Advie, the sound file analysis was one of the puzzles that made me sweat blood. In the Watchmen game, the player is given a clue but no in-game options to solve it. Some of the puzzles can be solved, old school, on a piece of paper, like cryptograms. Others, like encryptions, require addition software or extensive internet research.  When I did the sound file puzzle, my Win10 computer was just a couple of months old. I hadn’t decided what software I wanted to update so I only had Windows Media Player and Winamp on it. I hunted around and found Audacity which would basically do the job and it was free. So I downloaded the sound file, isolated the tracks, removed noise and fiddled with the speed, reverb and a bunch of other confusing things and played it backwards. I’m not an audiophile so it was hard work. I finally found the clue only to discover the darn thing was in another language. I’m an American so speaking other languages is not my strong suit. I could only understand one word. So, after two hours and a headache, I went on the Black Watchmen forum and found a translation which let me solve the rest of the puzzle. You probably could have solved it easily with the proper software and the knowledge to use it, if you speak the language in the sound file. I only gave myself a small pat on the back for getting as far as I did. And I felt no guilt for cheating. It was an honest puzzle, well executed and fairly presented albeit quite difficult for me.  It was my own language deficiencies that caused the problem.

I fear I may never be satisfied with another detective game again after reading this conference paper by Clara Fernandez-Vara about how to design a Sherlock Holmes game:

http://www.digra.org/digital-library/publications/the-games-afoot-designing-sherlock-holmes/

Advie - 25 October 2017 04:20 AM

Woow, that is super dedication, but now i have to tell husband that you are really crazy!

Oh, let’s not tell him that. He’s better off not knowing.

Phlebas, that’s an absolutely fascinating paper. It successfully points out the limitations of video games in the area of true player participation and her ideas for improvement are workable. But every video game must follow a script, story and code, in an orderly fashion to work. There is always only one correct answer for each puzzle. How the player gets there is the interesting part which I think was the point of her paper. She wrote it in 2013 so I’m wondering if she’s played any of the choices matter games since then. Different branching paths was not one of her suggestions probably because she was using Sherlock Holmes as her standard and all puzzles would have to be resolved in a Holmesian manner.

I’ve loved the Sherlock games but one of the most tedious puzzles I’ve ever come across was in Sherlock Holmes versus Arsene Lupin. Finding that damn bird at the Tower of London was a huge pain in the neck and very little fun.

Black Watchmen surpasses Sypcraft

Have yet to find a game that has depicted realistic investigative work better than Hopkins FBI.