Repetition ruins quirky quiz puzzler
The online family quiz became a regular feature of many people’s lockdown. If your thoughts ever drifted to murder by round three, this may well be the game for you.
Who Pressed Mute On Uncle Marcus? is set during one tense quiz involving one particularly dysfunctional family.
You play as daughter Abby, who must determine which relative poisoned her beloved uncle as well as identifying the antidote which will save his life.
You do this by choosing different responses offered to you at certain points in the story: should you press your moody cousin on his gun fixation or instead ingratiate yourself with him by agreeing to his dubious answer to a question?
The game features video of real actors — including Andy Buckley from the US version of The Office –— hamming it up and, if you played through Bandersnatch on Netflix a few years back, you’ll know what to expect.
The issue with narrative games like this, apart from the fact that your interaction is limited to a binary decision every three minutes at best, is that you never quite know if your choice made much difference to the direction of the story. Not so here. You have to replay the game multiple times to slowly uncover more evidence.
The repetition makes it feel like you’re a real detective constantly asking the same question to a suspect, hoping to spot an inconsistency, which might be authentic but jars with the daft dialogue and cast of caricatures.