examining the evidence
What makes a great detective game?
some lean years during the Noughties, though there were still a few kicking around, such as the PC and Wii Agatha Christie games and the prolific CSI and Nancy Drew series. However, there’s been a strong resurgence, kicked off by the growth of indie gaming. Prime examples of that are the retro-styled pixel art point-and-clicks released by indie developer and publisher, Wadjet Eye, starting with The Shivah
– a point-and-click about a rabbi facing a crisis of faith investigating the murder of a member of his synagogue – and the first entry in the Blackwell series, which both released in 2006.
“Blackwell was inspired by the Alfred Hitchcock film Family Plot”, says Dave Gilbert on the inspiration behind his supernatural detective series where the protagonists’ ghostly friend Joey can be used to get information from recently deceased victims. “One of the main characters is a ditzy medium who often calls upon her spirit guide named Geronimo. It was never established if the medium’s powers were real or not, but I remember feeling bad for Geronimo who was forced to be at this annoying woman’s beck and call with no way of escaping. I wanted to tell a story about a medium and a spirit guide, with the aim of
“the mystery you are trying to solve has to be just as engaging as the steps you are taking to solve it” Dave Gilbert
making you feel sympathy for the spirit guide. The characters of Rosa and Joey formed soon after.”
Rosa doesn’t just rely on her spirit guide during her investigations. The other key tool in her locker is her trusty notebook, which gradually fills up with the clues you collect. “That was lifted from Discworld
Noir almost verbatim,” Dave says. “It’s a great way of interacting with a mystery story and I’m surprised more developers haven’t used it.”
Given that Wadjet Eye almost has its own cottage industry of detective games – 2011’s Gemini Rue, 2015’s Technobabylon and 2018’s Unavowed all have strong detective elements, if not being explicit detective games – it clearly knows what makes a good mystery. “A good detective game needs to juggle two stories at once: The ‘What happened?’ and the ‘What is happening?’ The mystery you are trying to solve has to be just as engaging as the steps you are taking to solve it. It is harder to mesh those two things than you’d think,” Dave concludes.
Indie point-and-click detective adventures remain in a healthy place. As well as Wadjet Eye’s output, we’ve had Telltale’s comic book fantasy detective adventure The Wolf Among Us in 2013, 2016’s Kathy Rain, where a young journalism student returns to her hometown to investigate her grandfather’s death, also using a Noir-style notebook, and, this year, the Victorianlike Lamplight City, where takes the intriguing approach of letting you fail to pin crimes on the right person and have the story adapt to your choices.
Of course, adventure games are not the only kinds of detective games. There are a number of high-profile examples of games that have tried to infuse the detective genre with more action-heavy elements and mix it with other styles.
2009’s Batman: Arkham Asylum is one of the towering examples of how detective elements can work in an action experience. Even when you’re not explicitly performing detective work – following trails using Batman’s detective vision or working on one of The Riddler’s puzzles – the game benefits from structuring itself like a mystery. The Dark Knight
moves from place to place based on the clues he uncovers at each location you visit, letting you know where to go next while keeping you intrigued about what you might find there.
2010’s Deadly Premonition is a great example of how mystery can connect supernatural tales and detective fiction, blending third-person survival horror with detective work as you hunt a serial killer in a surreal Twin Peak-inspired small town. The game has gained a cult following, bolstered by a director’s cut rerelease in 2013.
LA Noire represents Rockstar’s attempt to situate the detective within its open world template. Crime scene investigation rubs up against chases and gunfights in a seedy, corrupt vision of LA that draws on the style of film noir and the city’s real history of crime, which forms the bases of its cases as you work your way through the Traffic, Homicide, Vice and Arson departments. The game’s headline feature was a unique attempt to express one of the key elements of detective fiction: the interrogation. This was present as far back as with Deadline, where you could glean new bits of information by unsettling a suspect with a well-timed accusation. It’s there in Discworld Noir, where the clues you’ve gathered can be used to force confessions out of shady characters. It’s in longrunning lawyer-themed series Ace Attorney, where evidence gathered through investigative sections can be used to expose contradictions in witness testimonies during courtroom battles. LA Noire sought to zero-in on that aspect with its expensive Motionscan technology. The idea is that actor’s faces are scanned in such detail, that you can read their reactions and encourage them when they are telling the truth or call them out when they are lying. It didn’t always work, necessitating some hammy, shifty-eyed performances, but it’s an interesting approach.
That attempt at innovation ultimately didn’t pay off for developer Team Bondi, the high costs of Motionscan playing a role in the company shutting down, but detective games have continued to play with new ideas in recent years.
The critically acclaimed Her Story from 2015 is a fantastically clever detective title that presents you with a searchable database of police interview clips that you navigate using clues and intuition to piece together the story of what happened. 2016 gave us Kona, which situates its detective in the survival genre, Orwell, which brings detective work into the modern world by having you investigate citizens through their social media interactions, and the critically acclaimed, Virginia, which experiments with editing in videogame storytelling, using an impressionistic approach that makes its missing person mystery more about your interpretation than solving puzzles. As recently as October, Lucas Pope of Papers, Please fame released a detective game set aboard an abandoned ship, The Return Of The Obra Dinn. You revisit the deaths of its crew members with a magic watch to try and piece together the story of their macabre end.
We can only conclude our investigation by saying that detective games are alive and well.