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Obra Dinn does have one fun gesture in the direction of replayability - an achievement for getting every single fact in the case wrong. It was actually pretty entertaining going back just to immediately file a report claiming the captain had cannibalized the entire crew, then skipping straight to the epilogue. Sort of like the gameplay equivalent of an after dinner mint.
Is that the same as the achievement where you put the Captain down as the murderer for every victim (including the Captain) because he's the Captain and all of his crew were his responsibility?
@@MLB9000 that's correct, yes. It was a few years ago, I must've misremembered the details. I thought that getting the cause of death wrong for every victim was also required, even if the Captain actually was responsible. I could be wrong, though.
Frogware’s previous two Sherlock Holmes games, Crimes and Punishments and The Devil’s Daughter, did a similar thing to Chapter 1 where it gives you multiple possible conclusions to a case, but once you’ve made your decision you have the option to see whether or not you were correct. This allows the player to make their deductions and solve the case but can opt out of seeing how right or wrong they were. I always found it to be a considerate middle ground.
Agreed. I do like the touch of "gut instinct" you have to rely on when it comes to solving their mysteries, as in real life, nothing is ever so cut and dry. That "check your results" mechanic was also great at the end of the game when I just wanted to see how I did, without getting bogged down by it during the actual story. Frogwares also did this with "The Sinking City" where certain morality choices you made would often give you a subtle nod hours later letting you know whether you made the right call or not. I very much appreciate that style.
I believe Crimes and Punishments and The Devil's Daughter totally nailed the Sherlock Holmes-detective style games. We need more of that in other settings. I hope someone in the AAA industry will pay attention to this.
Crime and Punishments especially isn't necessarily about being right. Sometimes you can deduce the murder but use the reputation of being Sherlock Holmes to finger someone else for it because you think they're more deserving of the punishment.
..."previous two Sherlock Holmes games." You know, the ones that came before "Chapter 1." I'm beginning to think it isn't so much a matter of being clever that they designed open-ended games where you never find the murderer. Rather, feels like make they just aren't clever enough to deliver a game that scatters both real and false clues without everyone figuring it out halfway through. Like it's the opposite of LA Noire. Noire has to hand you everything on a silver platter so you get the "intended experience." Frogware took the opposing view that you wouldn't have the intended experience of feeling like a clever detective if any answers actually existed. "It'd be too obvious if we included any clues that pointed to the actual murderer."
The game that gave me the most satisfying feeling of piecing together the facts in a detective-like fashion is Outer Wilds. And it's never described or advertised as a detective type game.
His description of the lack of replayability fits Outer Wilds perfectly. Outer Wilds is definitely very similar to these detective games, and I think it only differs in that, as you said, it's not presented as one. And there are multiple mysteries to solve, not all of which require solving to reach the end of the game. Hell, you're even given the equivalent of a detective board with pictures connected with yarn.
This. Ever since I finished outerwilds I’ve been painfully aware of an itch that I didn’t even know I’d had. God I wish I could experience that game for the first time again
I thought the lack of a conclusive solution to the mystery was going to be a deal breaker for me with Pentiment, but I loved it and thought it kind of worked well as a narrative foil for the unknowableness of history.
It especially worked because of all the stuff going on in the background. There are 2 mysteries going on at any given time, and while you can't spectacularly fail, the fact you're also getting clues about the underlying mystery helps
If Pentiment wasn't so goddamn delightful to look at and interact with, the mystery definitely would have crippled it. But Obsidian's RPG experience meant that there was engaging story even outside the mystery.
_Pentiment_ is a game I’d never heard about, but I’d wondered before, “How long before someone makes a video game out of _The Name of the Rose?”_ I guess it’s fair game as a concept, though.
In my opinion Pentiment is the game most designed to appeal to historians ever. Your human informants are all too human and your evidence that you can gather in a reasonable time is limited. For what its worth I have a pretty solid guess at who committed the murders and it seems there is a growing consensus over that.
@@MegaZeta I played Pentiment with my GF who read Name of the Rose and she was like a kid at an amusement park, pointing out ghe many references and inspirations. It was fun, I loved the game and even the mystery. Was slightly disappointed you couldn't solve it earlier even if it was near impossible, but the conclusion was still satisfying
A detective game that tried to solve the replayability problem was the old blade runner point and click adventure game. It randomized clues, events, and who is actually a replicant. I haven't played it so I don't know exactly how replayable it is, but it's an interesting concept that would be fun to see played out in more games.
the endings are wildly different you could....(spoilers) find out YOU are also a replicant and help them escape solve the murder(s) normally as a human join the replicants as an undercover cop and then when they all trust you, you kill them all. among other things
I wonder if there is some way to build a detective game using the Columbo mechanic, in which you know who does the crime at the beginning but it's still fun to see how it all gets pieced together.
However, the ace attorney games (even my favorite so far, the Great Ace Attorney Chronicles) has an issue where a murderer is so blatantly obvious that I called the murder of the last case of the second game in the Ace Attorney Chronicles way back in the first game. Moderate spoilers behind "read more" I straight up called someone as a Final boss so quickly that I swear that my spoiler tag is unnecessary, but as early as the 3rd case in the first game I was like "He is going to show up in court... he has the Gant Effect about him." and lo and behold there he was, as the judge no less. Arguing in favor of the judges guilt is quite a tall order for AAC2: Resolve.
There could be, in a similar way that knowing a puzzle, and the finished state of the puzzle, still needs you to figure out how to get from point A to point B A Columbo game, then, in true Columbo spirit, is about getting closer and closer to the answer that you already know, and the challenge of it is to finish the game with as few clues and questions possible by getting the suspect to incriminate themselves. That could be fun, and allow for fun bits of "I found an important thing" with the distinctive Columbo sting
there is also this thing in Obra Dinn where it kinda suggests you get it wrong on purpose. there is this one sailor, who is in a ton the memory fragments. he's a good guy trying to keep everything together and is one of the last ones, I think, to die. but if you do everything by the book his estate will get a fine of 50pounds because he killed a another crew member that was a mutineer. now, if you empathize with him you could get it wrong and get a better ending for his family
@@rpl1318 and then on the other hand you have one of the stewards who dies in a swordfight for defending the deserter's boat and doesn't get fined for attempted mutiny
As with his own game, Phasmo is more of a "eliminate possibilities" game and not a "detective game." The key element is "lying." Nothing in Phasmo "lies" to you. You don't have to sus out if something is false or not, you just hunt for truths over and over until you have enough truths to draw a conclusion. You're never given a piece of false or even misleading information. It's always "this piece of information can be four different things" and you correlate until you have the correct answer. The only reason to "guess" in Phasmo is time/death pressure.
@@Orchestructive the Mimic ghost type will pretend to be another ghost by behavior, but its evidence will always point to it being a Mimic, so phasmo does tell you a half-truth on occasion
@@Orchestructive when playing with friends it's always the possibility that someone made a mistake (I swore it emf 5, I think I saw my breath, did you hear that?) if you had infinite time you would figure it out, but eventually you have to just run away and go (I guess it's _____).
I still can't get over the fact Yahtzee didn't take to the Outer Wilds. You are essentially a space detective in that and it ticks all the boxes of other games he likes.
Every now and then we find something that all our friends and coworkers recommend as something we would like, but when we try it out we just can't get into it. Outer Wilds seems to be that to Yahtzee. It seems like the more popular something is, the harder time we have believing someone wouldn't like it.
I would highly recommend "Overboard!" for someone looking for a game that doesn't do much handholding. It's a point-and-click detective game from the murderer's perspective. The player is allowed to basically do anything they want for the entire game and take the knowledge from previous runs and apply them to future ones. The game is short but you'll want to replay it many times to figure out how to get the best ending.
Not a detective game, but a detective side quest, in Witcher 3 there's a great quest where you need to deduce the serial killer in town. Get it wrong and the game tricks you into thinking you got it right until you come back to town later and find people still being serial killed. I think that could somehow get worked into a detective game proper.
I do think that is the best way to do it in games not necesarily focused on detective work. Have a small bite of detective work in between the other bits and let the consequences pay off down the line. Another, sorta, example I can think off is Deus Ex: Human Revolution. At one point you are prompted to get an update for your augmentations as there is a glitch going around (and indeed the players view occasionally spazes out around this time). However if the player pays enough attention to the plot, they might know just enough to get suspicious of this patch and if they forgo it the glitches soon vanish and much later in the game, a boss tries to turn off your augmentations and only succeeds if you got the patch. Not really detective work in the traditional sense, but damn if I did not feel good about myself when I got to the boss after finding the offered software patch very suspicious given context in the story.
It could theoretically work in something like the Sherlock Holmes game mentioned. One scenario the murder continue, if you get it right they stop. You'd have to tell the rest of the story through environmental storytelling, not forcing a whole sidequest, but it could be done well, in my opnion.
in the 1st witcher a good part of 2nd chapter is an investigation and if you fail you fight the boss at a disadvantage, but if you did your work right he's the one that gets a disadvantage IIRC
I realize I'm a bit late to this party, but I genuinely wonder what Yahtzee would think about Shadows of Doubt. I feel like it definitely has some of the problems he's described, but I also love it because it's happening in a city you know, or get to know, so you could conceivably already know everything about the murderer, and just seeing the one clue could be enough to give it away immediately. While on the other hand, the clue could be something as small as "they like chess and have green eyes", then you've really got your work cut out for you.
I think Disco Elysium shows how you can have choices matter while still keeping a single answer to the murder mystery. I played it through 3 times and learned new things about what was going on each time. The different character builds also contributed to the replayability.
because Disco Elysium had two narrative arcs--the actual mystery, which will be the same in every playthrough, and the protagonist's reaction to the mystery of their own lost memory, which will be different in every playthrough.
And it's also not a detective game whatsoever, cause game hides the relevant facts to solving the case until the very end. You can't feel clever if answer could have never been an option that you could come up with or verify in any way.
@@IntegralHamster you could argue that for the final mystery but the game does have many smaller moments to allow you to figure those parts out for yourself.
The only detective game I could think of with some degree of replayability would be "Paradise Killer". This game has you solve a murder in a vaporwave-style open world where you can start the final trial at any point you want. While there are "correct" solutions, you still have to present enough evidence to undermine your claim. Simultaneously, you can try to frame someone even though you know they're innocent or withhold information to prevent someone from being punished.
I really enjoyed PK but never felt the game gave me a good reason to go to trial early. To my memory there's no time limit or reward for incriminating somebody early. After finding 100% of the clues there aren't really multiple interpretations of what happened. One thing that PK did do really well is give you a clue which points right at somebody, only to have that character deflect the clue with something legitimately plausible.
@@skalty9868 some of the perpetrators aren't assholes/are friends with the protagonist, and some people you may not like never _actually_ did anything wrong.
@@curtin1107 I think I disagree with you here. Everyone there did something wrong. They're living in a paradise created through countless cycles of sacrificing all of the humans they bring there. This isn't even a spoiler, the game tells you this right at the start. Whether or not they committed the main murder, they're all bad.
@@elliotkarlin3398 ok that's definitely true. every single character on the island (with one exception) is terrible. However, some people have done nothing wrong _within the context of the case you're trying to solve_ - ie: they may be guilty of being terrible people, but they're not guilty of the crimes you're supposed to be investigating.
I feel like "Outer Wilds" is another amazing example of a detective game! You're dropped into this setting with a specific set of tools and have to use them and your brain to unravel a grand mystery!
outer wilds was exhausting for me to play, it was well made no doubt but having to get dizzy on each planet just so I can get a nugget of info and repeat the process cause the timer ended before I could experience everything was not fun. at one point i just decided to watch someone else play it and even then i got a bit nauseous.
@@Typical7 I can definitely see it being a hard game for people with motion sensitivity to play. I never had issues myself but it's certainly understandable.
I love the idea that the only difference between your first run and your last run is the inventory of facts in your head. I'd love a list of games that recreate the experience of Obra Dinn or Outer Wilds where the only thing you accumulate is information.
Yeah, but when you're wrong in Ace Attorney the game just smacks you with a penalty and says "No! Now try again until you get it right!" Sure there's a game over if you run out of penalty stocks, but then you just restore to a checkpoint. You aren't allowed to PROCEED with the game after having been wrong about something because the story is always entirely linear.
I mean getting it wrong in ace attorney is "no no you were supposed to present the photo of the banana not the actual banana! That's for the statement right after this one, PENALTY"
@@ArcaneAzmadi this is a thing I liked about LA Noir. Because while you'd go further in the story after making the arrest your score determines how likely they'll actually get convicted. Homicide also has a interesting twist where you where actually following a serial killer the entire time, so all of the people you arrested get their charges dropped. One problem. You can arrest unrelated murderers and sex pest, meaning they're also gonna have those charges dropped too.
I only started Obra Dinn in the last couple of days and it's extraordinary. I am really engaged with the story, feel clever when I spot something and, as advised by senpai Yahtz am taking my time with it. I want to drag it out as long as possible
I'm impressed by your self-discipline - I smashed through it in about 2 or 3 sittings. I loved it so much I just couldn't drag myself away from it until I'd finished.
@@Hundeputzmunter Same. I started it at 8PM and didn't go to bed until 4AM, at which point I was only missing the very last bit that I finished the moment I got out of bed the next day. It's one of the most satisfying game experiences in recent memory for me.
Another game that comes to mind is Outer Wilds. Not exactly a murder mystery game, but certainly one where you have to "solve" many mysteries about the world you're in. You're in a small solar system, member of a recent spacefaring species, who have found ruins and skeletons of an ancient alien spiecies all throughout the solar system. You're the first astronaut with a working translator tool, so your job is to be curious and fuck around and find out what happened to those ancient aliens. - where did they come from? - why did they die? - what have they built? - why did they build those things? - what is happening in the solar system? The answer to "Who dunnit?" doesn't have to be a person in this game. It's honestly the best game I've ever played, and also the hardest one to promote to other people, because it's so spoiler sensitive. (like any detective game)
The Painscreek Killings is a great and hugely underappreciated detective videogame. You arrive as a reporter in an abandoned town to investigate a murder that happened years ago, but you can leave the town at any time and try to write the article with what you've gathered already. On my first shot through the game I left the town almost immediately and submitted random guesses to the newspaper about who the murderer was and what murder weapon they used. I got fired. I think that counts as failing miserably.
There are three games that I've played that scratch Return of the Obra Dinn's detective itch. Other people have mentioned Outer Wilds, but I would like to additionally throw in The Sexy Brutale and Subsurface Circular. The Sexy Brutale is similar to Return of the Obra Dinn in that you have a magic pocket watch with some time travel mechanics and that you can see the moment each character dies, but the main difference is that you're responsible for saving the characters yourself. You're still gathering information about the characters, and then you get to use that information to save the characters themselves as a test of your knowledge. Subsurface Circular, by contrast, is a game about solving a mystery about the disappearance of a bunch of robots, but you play as a robot detective that's not allowed to leave its train car. The information gathering is done well since you can initiate a question by using any of the information you have collected and get new information that you can use to ask others about the case, as well as the robots you interrogate having their own quirks from being machines like the football player with overactive sponsorship chips. This one is short, but it's well worth it for story reasons I will not spoil.
I didn't much care for Sexy Brutale - I thought the story was wonderfully well written and the hook was great but the puzzles fell extremely short and left me feeling unengaged- I was hoping to have to meticulously plan routes and learn the ins and outs of every inch of the mansion to string together the perfect series of actions to set up an outcome that felt satisfying and rewarding - but that never happened. The devs wanted to tell the story, rather than letting me take part in it as anything other than an observer. It felt more like I was playing through a visual novel dressed up as a puzzle game and it never reached its true potential as a result. The chapters were isolated from each other and didn't play into one another, you can brute force run through occupied rooms with little consequence rather than sneaking around. Again, really great story, unimpressive puzzles.
Well it certainly "pieces out the story in little nuggets for you to mentally piece together in the background" and makes you "hunt around for pieces of information that you combine to help deduce a sequence of events in order to unlock the door of your own intelligence", as Yahtzee put it. And its "aha" moments certainly can't be had more than once without the help of alcohol and brain injuries. And it's built a whole community of people gleefully watching new blind playthroughs of it, vicariously reliving the experience again and again. The game doesn't exactly make you do detective work, strictly speaking, but I still think it counts.
@@haunter6682 If Yahtzee was the sort of reviewer to do it, I think The Outer Wilds is a game he could return to and consider if his opinion of it changed. It got caught up in a lot of the "It's basically the same game as Outer Worlds, lol," mentality when it came out, but he's gone back to it as an example of good game design at least once since then.
As much as I liked Pentiment, the unresolved nature of cases did leave me wanting. I do think it fits the tone of the game - uncertainty is core part of the character and it eats at him through the years. I think it narrative reason for open ended news, rather than replayability. Giving answer would give a kind of release and catharsis that would go against the tone of the title. And even if “true” culprit remains unknown, we do get to make interesting revelations along the way. It somewhat reminds me of the film “White Ribbon” - where the fact that so many people could be suspected of committing crimes was very much the commentary in itself.
Not that AI the Somnium Files is a detective game, but I think their approach of "dead ends lead to solving some unrelated mystery" would add a good bit of replayability. In this path you didn't solve the case, but you managed to resolve some long-standing issues with your roommate; partial victory, roll credits.
Definitely had the "a-ha!" moment in the first game once you get enough facts to piece together the mystery as well. Both of them and the Danganronpa series were the only games where I didn't necessarily get the entire picture until the "a-ha!" moment.
I would gobble up a yearly Obra Dinn sequel, or even inferior knock offs. The Case of the Golden Idol works on a similar system if anyone else needs more Obra Dinn.
I just finished the case of the golden idol and now I'm once again back to desperately looking for another fix of that sweet sweet Obra Dinn detective action.
A few of my favorite examples of detective games are the Detective Grimoire games (especially the recent entry "Tangle Tower") and the old Scooby Doo CD-Rom games like "Phantom of the Knight". The former for the depth in puzzle solving, and the latter for their replayability. In Tangle Tower, every suspect has something to say about every piece of evidence you can find, as well as opinions/histories with the other suspects. This means that you need to cross reference each different character's stories to deduce possible motives or find conflicting statements. It also means that every new item/interaction leads to more dialogue as the game progresses. Later on you end up combining clues and directly confronting suspects to open new avenues of investigation. It's the sort of game that rewards exhausting every nitpick you can think of. Meanwhile in the Scooby CD-Rom Mysteries, the actual perpetrator is chosen randomly from the list of possible suspects. This also means that the evidence you find against them will change to clue you in on the real perp. A discarded cloth for example may have hair gel smeared on it in one playthrough and motor oil the next. This is on top of the red herrings that will be sprinkled throughout the game to try and throw you off the scent. Surprisingly I think Consuming Shadow is one of the only mystery games I've seen to implement a similar feature since. On an unrelated note, it was also delightful how they used the established voice actors and character designs for the late 90s/early 2000s movies!
I thought Tangle Tower was a really fun and charming game ... until the godawful end reveal, anyway. And it's kind of frustrating, because like Yahtzee says, that's kind of the point of the whole thing. If the ending sucks it's kind of hard to recommend the rest of the game, even if theoretically there's a version with a better ending reveal.
Paradise killer is an interesting one, not because of repeatability but because you can choose to stop investigating at any time and can accuse anyone without getting a game over
I feel obligated to point out that Hanako Games (of Long Live the Queen fame) has actually made a procedural mystery game titled Black Closet. While it may not have the same degree of hook as her best known game, it's still well designed and has a very distinct visual identity, so it may be worth looking into further.
What I think would make detective games replayable is if the player's actions leading up to the mystery affected who did what when where how and why. That way, there would be multiple puzzles the player can solve, and they can revisit specific puzzles by remembering the decisions they made before the mystery happened.
Funny how Outer Wilds does not sell itself as a detective game but is one with exploration (as everyone said Yatzee really should revisit that one) but Pentiment does sell itself as a sort of detective game but ends up being more of a Telltale historical drama (the good kind, where your decisions matter)
It's interesting to bring up the "just make another" idea with the TV show, because that's how the vast majority of mystery content exists. Many libraries and bookstores will have entire mystery sections populated by very prolific authors, and NCIS got like three separate series from the formula. Looking at how those sorts of things recycle the formula might give an insight on how to do a procedural mystery.
You also get stuff like Detective Conan where it's been a long running series for decades of "guy solves a murder, kidnapping, theft case" but that's the point isn't it. Recycled formulas can feel boring for many things, but mystery can get away with it as long as the writer is competent.
It's funny that yahtzzes description of detective games is completely in line with Outer Wilds game design philosophy. Because back when it came out he seemed to not get the appeal and i think didn't even properly review it. Like homie that game did the exact thing you talk about, just unlike obra dinn there isn't a pop up tutorial right at the start that tells you how you gain the knowledge or what to look out for. You actually have to explore and make sense of everything and then test your theories, not just check the right boxes on a list of possibilities.
I really wish he would do an outer wilds review. For the reasons you state I think he would absolutely love the game if he played through it. It is an exemplar of the kind of gameplay Yahtzee continually champions.
For some reason it doesn’t really feel like a detective game. It’s more of a “scientific method: the game” game because satisfaction comes from interacting with the physics of the world rather than solving a puzzle or past event just by looking at all the clues and logically figuring it out. In Outer Wilds the clues basically tell you what happened, the difficulty then comes from getting to the clues. I love Outer Wilds though, it’s a great game.
@@sablen1319 I partially disagree with that. It has been a while since I played it, but I remember one of the most important things in the game was figuring out what happened to the previous alien race whose name escapes me now, and understanding their journey and society is what allows you to get to clues. There are clues that basically point to the destination, sure, but there are also clues that require you to combine it with your knowledge of the other aliens, so in that sense it works like a detective game.
The example I'm about to give isn't a detective game, but I think the Ace Attorney series does this pretty well. Sure, it can still be called a point-and-click puzzle game, where the cross-examination prompts in the courtroom are the locks and certain pieces of evidence are the keys, but it's a unique spin on the formula that hasn't been replicated since (or at least, it hasn't been done well since). You're also only allowed a limited number of incorrect guesses before the judge gives up on you, either resulting in a Game Over or a Bad Ending depending on which game you're playing and how far into the case you got.
I hope Yahtzee plays The Sexy Brutale at some point. Also, anyone here who wants to scratch that Obra Dinn itch and can't because they've already played it should try it as well. Great music, a plot that leaves you guessing until the end, and plenty of those AHA! moments to make you feel clever about solving the puzzles.
Disco Elysium is one of my all time favorite games, and its always struck me as something that was right up Yhatzee's alley. Wondering why I haven't seen more discourse from him about the game, would love a long form review or discussion from him about it. Still love the Punctuation series, keep up the great work! :)
Yahtzee's love of Disco Elysium is pretty documented, and he probably mentions it just as much Obra Dinn, if not slightly less. He reviewed it in his Call of Duty 5 video and named it his game of the year, and one of the best games of the decade.
One of my all time favourites, Disco Elysium isn't really a detective \*game* so much as it is a detective visual novel. It's also a game where the details of the murder are secondary to both the ongoing Worker's Strike that it enflamed, as well as the Protagonist's own condition. I think it's possible to fuck up the eventual arrest of the murderer, but never outright getting it "wrong" like Yahtzee means.
Fun to come back to this after Shadows of Doubt, where the answer to "Can you procedurally create a mystery that involves genuine deduction?" is a soft "Mostly?"
999 is my favorite "detective" game, and I found myself nodding along that it hit all the high points and none of the low points mentioned by Yahtzee here. The one possible exception is that it did have a few different endings that might show the villain as different people, but given the time loop aspect of it it's possible that the choices I made that loop influenced the events and made them a villain... Anyway, I loved it very much. The original, I didn't love the other Zero Escape games so much. Thank you for another review that gave me more to think about when I play the games I love!
I adore 999, but it's not really the kind of game Yahtzee was describing. Solving every escape room can be boiled down to just examining everything, and the characters solve a lot of it themselves. As for finding the correct story path, it can be easily brute forced and not nearly as open as something like Obra Dinn.
I did really enjoy 999(and the sequels, to whoever is going to start whining about them) but they're just a slight step above being a visual novel. The deduction is more like puzzle rooms with a good bit of point and click adventure hunting for clues in each room. It's not clever or driven by the narrative in the same way Obra Dinn is, rather whatever you uncover unlocks more of the narrative with a sort of more traditional "gameplay paves way for more story exposition" through dialogue or a cutscene. Still entertaining as hell, and I loved that the whole meta-structure of the game is part of the puzzle and progression while acting as multiple replays.
Yes, these are good points, it is more of a visual novel that can be brute-forced than a true detective game. Of course, most detective games can be brute-forced as well. Obra Dinn is a rare gem.
There is a game in the Steam Next Fest called Shadows of Doubt that is attempting to do a procedurally based detective game in which the entire city and cases are randomly generated and I think it could have a chance at pulling it off. It plays pretty well in the hour demo they give you and hits several points Yahtzee made in this video but again we'll have to see.
I remember playing Freddie Fish 3: The Case of the Stolen Conch Shell. It is an adventure game, but it becomes a detective game right at the end. Freddie pulls out an item belonging to one of the characters you've met along the way, and that's the one who stole it. It changes every time you play, so that's a pro. That said, the answer of who said belongs to is quite obvious if you have any intelligence. Especially after I noticed I didn't get an item from the character who stole it after I played it twice. Didn't see what would happen if I was wrong, but it is possible.
It's probably been suggested to you already, but you should play Shadows of Doubt. It's a detective game that randomly generates an entire city, along with a couple hundred NPCs, and you can explore all of it. Every room in every building. It doesn't hold your hand with any of the investigation either. You even have to fill in a form describing the details about the murders. It does tell you if you got it right, but since theoretically anybody in the city could be a suspect, it isn't something that can be brute forced.
I feel 2 games should be brought up for this conversation: The Case of the Golden Idol, hearlded by many as the best detective game since Obra Dinn, and, suprisingly, Phasmaphobia. Hearing your snippet on The Consuming Shadow makes me wonder if there is any actual connection between TCS and Phas...?
"The Painscreek Killings". The game came out in 2017 and was barley advertised on steam. it's a little open world detective game where you go through an empty village and put together who killed a single woman. The actual story of the game bend a bit toward the soap opera side sometimes but the actual investigation part of it is tied together very well. I anyone else plays it, please remember to write down what key goes where. You will hate yourself if you don't.
The perfect detective game should let us fail, never outright tell us the correct solution, but give us the tools to find the correct one in a way that we know that we did.
I would like to try and point as many people as I can to a game called Remnant Records. It’s an Early Access co-op horror game that rose from the hype that surrounded Phasmophobia. Unlike Phasmo however, the game asks you to patrol a house with a very hostile ghost and deduce what items are important to their life and death in order to exorcise them. All mysteries are randomly generated. Some of the clues, at least at easier levels feel a bit check-listy, but others can really be a treat. As an Anecdote, my friend and I were dealing with a child ghost. We found she had murdered one of her bullied, so obviously a murder weapon was needed, but another note in her journal describes “everyone is sleeping at the dinner table and not waking up, so im going to sleep too.” We couldn’t piece together what item that might correlate to, until my friend accidentally knocked the smoke detector down and we both lit up in realization. If your a fan of detective games, this one might be worth giving your support to, as I am sure with some fine tuning it could be a great romp. The ghost types themselves are well designed to interrupt your teams communication. One required you to be slow and quiet, another hides clues and objects in a mirrored dimension of our own. Another requires you to keep eye contact to prevent it from moving, all blending well in disrupting your investigation.
An indie game streaming service that gave you a simple mystery puzzle periodically actually sounds like an amazing product. It would be an awesome way to introduce new designers to the industry. An innovation team for the occasional new game types, and a writing team and then a general design team who keeps pumping out new mysteries
I can't remember which channel it was, but there's a great video out their about failure in games. It's important, it's necessary and there's absolutely a good way to do it. Just a pass/fail condition, an instant loss when your health runs out or, worst of all, no chance of failure at all is dull. There's nothing exciting about it, at best you just don't fail and will always trudge through eventually and at worst you get slapped with a game over screen seemingly at random. The best games let you fuck up without an instant game over, then let you try to solve the problem you've made which is super satisfying and feels more unique, or you fuck up a few more times and know you're totally out of options when the loss *does* happen. Dishonored is a fun one, regularly missing a guard and scrambling to a dodgy hiding place that I've got to try and escape from, falling from a ledge and frantically searching for an exit, and getting tripping some alarm or something drawing in guards are awesome. You've failed, things have got worse, but you're not quite hit with a restart yet. And that's what detective games struggle to do. Either you plug in the right answer or you don't and if your failure state is just a restart when the answer was wrong, then you might as well not have one
Should have mentioned the Laura Bow games as a really good example. Your choices matter since they unblock sections and you are also quizzed on the end on the deductions you made.
I’m currently working on a game idea where the protagonist is an office worker who drank so much he’s forgotten all of his coworker’s names and must find a way to relearn them all before his employee review. I’m obviously inspired by Obra Dinn, but also wanted to fix the one flaw of it in that you can only play it once. By using randomized names and giving multiple ways of collecting names, ranging from gossip, to rummaging through personal belongings, I’m hoping I can make something that’s fun to solve and replayable as well.
Outer Wilds has alot of aha moments. I wouldn’t exactly call it a detective game, but it definitely gives me the feeling that progression is only blocked by your own knowledge.
Heaven's Vault is a beautiful game which has you deciphering a heiroglyphic language, and while the game is great, I wish it let you fail more. Instead of giving confirmation that your definition of a word is correct, which it does after you've used it a few times, I wish it never did, and you would have to notice yourself when your words don't seem to make sense in a new context, prompting you to go back and analyse the different fragments you've encountered it in to try get it right.
In the replayability camp, apparently the point and click Blade Runner game has quite a bit of replayability by having it so that the elements involved in its mysteries can change from play through to play through From which characters are replicants, who is the people that did what, and even if areas are dangerously packed with mutants or not. Not sure how well that really pans out, but it's worth a look
My personal favourite detective game is blade runner, by the end you feel smart but also you feel conflicted. On wether or not you did the right thing, on certain plot elements and character moments. No matter which ending you achieve there's so many things left ambiguous, a certain twist on the playable character is there no matter but it's never confirmed to be true which makes it so fun and interesting to think over
Replayability is an issue with detective / mystery games, but just like good detective / mystery novels and movies, you come back to them for other reasons. I return to Ace Attorney often, either from showing the game to friends and them loving it, or just watching people's blind playthroughs online, because outside of the murder mystery, I love the characters and story woven between them through many cases.
I think I remember watching a video on plot twists and how they're good because they re-contextualize the earlier parts of the media. Maybe a replayable detective game is the sort where at the end, you learn something that makes you, upon replaying, think about the first cases in a unique way that isn't granted just by solving it.
I don't know how good it'll be but the upcoming Shadows of Doubt might be the exact detective game that Yathzee wants. I think there's some procedural generation in this open-world detective simulator.
I'm a big fan of detective games and I can understand the difficulty in today's age to do one with the precise point about replay-ability. I would have replayed various cases from L.A.Noire enough times to really only suggest that if you were bad enough the railroading on mention was really only allow for a very bad, bad ending with a chance to fluke the correct answer. I would love to see like what was suggested in Obra Dinn or more of that framework. Perhaps a meeting of the minds as I would love to see what could be come up with.
Discworld Noir is the game that always comes to mind when I think of a 'detective game.' It is also, however, a full point-and-click adventure game at the same time. You can't really be wrong, because you can't progress until you stumble onto the correct series of actions to get the next clue. Even so, it's still really good.
As you say, the answer to detective game "replayability" is just to make more of them. The mechanics don't need to change much because these aren't tests of skill. I guess another option is to do something like Clue - a murder mystery with multiple solutions and the game just kind of locks into one of them per playthrough.
I've actually seen an example of the latter: it was a point-and-click game meant for little kids where two fish investigate the theft of a conch shell. There are multiple suspects, and each playthrough has one of them selected at random.
There's also the posibility of having a somewhat branching narrative tree included in those "choice matters" games that you can at the end choose to go back through to pick something different if you feel that the resolution that the game gives you isn't correct (which the game also won't tell you). It's a bandaid fix, but with how specific Yahtzee's tastes are, a bandaid is likely all he's gonna get.
I remember you saying you bounced off of Outer Wilds and Paradise Killer, but those feel like wonderful "detective" games without the test at the end. Hell, even Obra Dinn never really "tests" your comprehension of the overarching story - you're just filing insurance claims for small-time one-off crimes. I think it's possible to have a satisfying conclusion without the game telling you "you're correct!" at the end - Paradise Killer manages to use its "convict anyone/execute justice" trial at the end to make a meaningful comment about moral ambiguity and the real-life power of the prosecutor. Also Obra Dinn took like 6 years for Lucas Pope to make I doubt he wants to return to that world lol. Really good interactive puzzles like that are *really hard* to make, especially at that scale. I'm sure his dev notes look like a Pepe Silvia meme. IIRC the Outer Wilds team also had that problem with their ballooning dev notes, and they just outright implemented their dev notes as the "rumor" map you see in your ship's log to help players keep track of what they had seen, too.
love the vid Yatz. I would add Paradise killer to the equation though as It's kinda in the middle of the two types of detective games you mentioned. It does have a definitive answer if you dig deep enough but by the time you put it all together you may no longer want to lay down the law on the head of the guilty, it has a unique way of coercing you into covering up the murder yourself and unjustly accusing someone else instead of the typical "catch the bad guy and see justice served."
One of my dream games is one where the mystery has multiple, definitive answers to the mystery that will vary depending on which leads you follow up (the main plot being about the disappearance of your outcast friend from your small town with a shady past). It would be sandbox-y and feel like how it does to go "mystery hunting" in GTA, only more explicit. You'd basically need to make a very detail dense explorable town with equally advanced NPCs, hide loads of clues in it, then alter their behavior and parts of the map depending on which ones the player picks up as they investigate further. I tried to do this in a Call of C'thulhu campaign once but the issue I ran into was that branching off to a different path too early ultimately meant you were locked in to a single answer early on, but branching off too late would mean replays of that campaign would go too similarly for too long. In the end I wound up with what was almost 3 different campaigns set on the one map that players would unknowingly decide on playing based on their first few actions. The only thing I did like was that what used to be story critical NPCs in one campaign would take on a different role in another campaign, and certain parts of the map would change in different ways if they no longer NEEDED to go there. I think what I tried to do had 3 stories that were so different that they meant criss crossing in and out of each other's narrative wasn't really possible (basically the cause of the creature invasion could vary from military mad science to ancient spiritual curse to aliens posing as gods, each one necessitating a different "solution" to the problem), so maybe that idea could work better if I just, you know, wrote it better. But you're right in that there needs to be SOME level of procedurally generated content the same way I as the Game Master could alter or correct things and drop hints subtly if my players were veering off into a dead end and wasting their time. That might just be something like item placement or extra NPC dialogue changing if the player wasn't making progress fast enough. If a system like that was well tuned to not be too hand holdy, it might work and let players still feel like a smarty pants. Some day....
I like how Consuming Shadow conceptually is identical to Phasmophobia but probably predates it by a bit. Agreed though biggest problem with LA Noir is the lie detector mechanic as it's too subtle to tell who's lying and who's not, though the game isn't entirely dependent on it as finding the clues through exploration is one of the best elements in the game before the inevitable bullet ridden climax. Obra Dinn looks pretty amazing, but intimidating where as Pentiment looks more casual and less involved.
Paradise Killer was a detective game I got a lot of enjoyment out of. Mainly because certain conversations and interrogations would open up the island for the player to gather more clues. So the loop was to find clues, ask culprits about it, go to a new area to confirm an alibi, and find more clues. Some of the puzzles are nonsensical and can break the immersion though. I liked the "find your own truth" aspect so you're not on essentially a guided tour, but that leaves the ending to be pretty anticlimactic. As long as you have enough evidence you can pin the crimes on anyone. Though *SPOILERS* you can do what feel logical based on the evidence you gathered and have some time for vigilante justice before the game ends. The soundtrack is also a banger.
I wish for a detective game that after the player made the accusation. The game turns into a Hitman game, as you the player play as the detective in the minds of the perpetrator, and does a full on Clue:The Movie style crime scene reenactment to see if your hypothesis can stand.
I wonder if the old Blade Runner game meets the replayability criteria. I haven’t played, but from what I understand the game has the main mystery, which has a small pool of randomized suspects but a correct answer for each play through, and side mysteries since you also need to find out which of the side characters are replicants in need of retiring, which is randomized every game.
Have you checked out "Keyword: A Spider's Thread"? Great detective game about finding information on social media sites. It feels very organic, puzzles are designed in a way how I imagine a real detective does their work. the only problem is its a bit short.
Like many people here, I think Phasmophobia is a good example of a detective game that you can play over and over. The houses, rooms, tools, and most importantly, clues are all really random. Deducting what kind of ghost you're dealing with gives you that "a ha!" moment pretty well. The problem is there is no real story to speak of. You're just some folks in a van trying to identify yet another ghost.
Let me solve Yahtzee's conundrum regarding the Pentiment and Sherlock Holmes problem. Embrace the replayability and then allow for organic communal discourse with other players, to collectively deduce which is the "canon" end. There, you get the added benefit of your multiple playthroughs getting different angles each time, you get to share with others who have their own interpretations and when you all come to a possibility (or two to split the community xD) you get the satisfaction.
I think Phasmophobia hits close to the mark on the procedural mystery front, particularly on the higher difficulties where you can't always rely on hard evidence. It certainly isn't afraid to let you fail, either.
If you like open ended mysteries, try Paradise Killer. You get your debrief of the preliminary facts and are told to go about the island, gather evidence and then present a case whenever you’re ready. Literally after the debrief, you can start the trial. Literally be the detective that goes “pretty open and shut, and I want to go home so let’s do this”. It’s also got some phoenix wright to it that if you really do your diligence, there’s a prospective series of events that seems like the ‘right’ one and that the subsequent trial makes it easy to have to answers flow around. It’s weird and unique and kinda seriously messed up and a great game.
In regards to detective games that say "Well that certainly is possible!", Paradise Killer does this as well. Certain charges that you present evidence for point to multiple people, and you just decide who to charge with the crime (and then execute). Some are pretty clearly one suspect or another, but there are a couple of very serious charges that you never really do get a for-sure answer for. I did once concept out the idea for a detective game where the murderer was randomized, and thus the clues and dialogue options were as well. I even sketched out some scenarios for rare extra storylines where the killer is multiple people, the killer is now hunting you, or if you talk to folks in a specific sequence, you get the secret ending. But making games is a long complicated process, so here I am, having not made it.
Wondering if Yahtz remembers *Murder on the Zinderneuf* from 1983. Way ahead of its time. The victim and culprit are randomized each run, and each of the 8 playable detectives has a personality that affects their suspect interrogations. The game is tedious to play today but I think modern design sensibilities could potentially make it really shine.
I am reminded of the tabletop rpg Traveller, and its adventure module "Murder on Arcturus Station." The module has a brilliant little murder mystery that uses the "Everyone is a suspect with a motive" setup as an excuse to make it where literally ANYONE can be the murderer. Of the main cast of the module there are about 14 characters, give or take (It's been a while) who can be the murderer, and the dm has to choose which one did it when they run their players through the module, and how they did it. One option even has a character with psychic powers as the culprit, using her mind control powers to make it look like YOU were the murderer. This means that there's a limited amount of options to choose from, sidestepping the usual problems of procedural generation, but on the other hand, no two playthroughs of the module will be quite the same.
There is an old Barbie Detective game I Player as a child. The cluehunting was very simple, but it is the only game I have ever seen that chaanges the identify of the thief in each playthrough. There are several suspects, each one has a motive, and the Computer randomly choose one at the beginning to be the culprit, and then you habe to figure out who.
I waited about two years before playing Obra Dinn again and it had more replay value than I expected. I remembered most of the story but the cast is large enough that I'd forgotten most of the details, so the puzzling was mostly the same as the first time around. The biggest difference was that some of the harder-to-spot clues were not so hard this time, and that's just fine with me. I like it better when the difficulty is in putting the clues together, not in actually spotting the clues.
You also need to play Outer Wilds! It's a space exploration game where you try to solve many different mysteries surrounding a long-dead alien species that has ruins all throughout the solar system. Best game I've ever played.
Please play Tangle Tower, I've been selling this game to everyone around me and will continue to do so - it's a great detective game and it's full of charm
On reflection Outer Wilds hits all those beats perfectly, the only progression is the gathering of information, that you have to work to find and then work even harder to know where to apply it. And it definitely lets you fail... a lot.
Dated but I did want to say that the old cyberpunk mystery game "Ripper" from the mid-90s did a reasonable job of handling it's mystery elements. It was a FMV game during that whole era and had some big name actors attached, and one of the big gimmicks is that there are four possible people who could be "The Ripper" and one is selected at the beginning of the game. A few puzzles and their solutions change, depending on who the actual culprit is, as does the deductive path to figure that out, and if at the end you haven't figured it out you get a bad ending. This game was sort of infamous because once you know how that works it can be easy to figure out, but if your playing for the first time, don't know the variables, or who the four possible answers could be.... well, a lot of people got bad endings during that era, and it took a while for people to deduce how it worked if they didn't have a guide and thus walkthroughs were slow to appear. Remember this was before the current internet. That was to be fair, perhaps the first detective type game I thought was any good, not that I am a huge fan of those. Let's just say as someone who was aspiring to really be an investigator, and went from a "Criminal Justice: Forensics" major hoping to catch bad people, to basically a sleaze working for the casino industry to generally catch buttheads, or cover up things for other buttheads, I became rather disenfranchised with the whole thing. I mean when you know how that industry works and how much it's set up to screw people on levels they don't even consider, it becomes hard to consider yourself a good person even when you catch people trying to screw them back, because of what the whole business basically is. Not to mention real investigation stuff is really bloody boring, I'm not sure how anyone ever came up with the TV/Movie idea of the whole thing, or why there is any kind of mystique to it. I mean I'm surprised why more people with dreams of being Sherlock Holmes don't off themselves when they experience the real deal honestly.
One interesting semi-procedural mystery game I played that I've never heard anyone talk about is "Gnosia". It's like playing Werewolf with a bunch of AI characters and the roles and situations change every round. You kind of have to deduce which AI is the Gnosia based on how they're acting, and you also have to convince the others that you aren't the Gnosia. It's pretty basic in that regard, but it's an interesting concept with an overarching story, and I'd love to hear Yahtzee's opinion on it.
My take: the reason why so few games match Fromsoft’s vibe is because the story is presented to the player as a mystery. Something happened, context clues are the only medium to discovering the story, and enough is missing from that story to make speculations about it meaningful. Did Marika kill her own son Godwyn to kickstart a revolution? Did Radagon ever have his own personhood or was he always an aspect of Marika? What are the motivations of the demigods, and why are they all fighting each other? Each layer of the story, setting, background, item descriptions, everything hints to a bigger mystery that is being intentionally left incomplete so that the player can complete it themselves. It’s dastardly good writing for games.
The thing I like about it is clues will be just be given to you, but you're given no reason to think an item has more plot relevance than it first appears. Sellen's final quest reward is a dagger that may hint that Radagon married Rennala to get the dagger so that he could merge with Marika via a primal glintstone exchange
The only mystery puzzle I've ever encountered that did the "once more, with feeling" effect well (well, well enough...) is one quest from RuneScape, Murder Mystery, where the killer is randomly assigned on each account that starts the quest, so you can't just blindly walk through it on each account. It's not complicated, or difficult to solve, but the answer is different every time (well, one of 6 possible differences).
This reminds me of the Director's Cuts of Broken Sword. The original two had all their fail states removed, most of which was George or Nico dying. Goerge was given cement shoes and thrown into a river, shot on a cliff, and Nico was choked to death. if you get the Director's Cuts on Steam these are all removed and you either auto-win, are told not to do something in narration, or are given unlimited time to solve something. It really takes out the urgency and fear when the game just says "no dying allowed." Thankfully they added in free DLC called "Original Version" which boils down to an emulation of the OG releases which keeps all the death states.
A way to handle the "did I get it right" without explicitly telling the player is to have a wrap up at the end where the game just says you got X out of Y solutions correct. This also has the advantage of not telling the user which things they got wrong, just that they got something wrong. That would make replay that much more interesting as you'd have to second guess every choice for every puzzle, and it would solve brute force since the player only gets the score at the end of the game.
The only game that came to my mind during this video was Freddi Fish 3: The Case of the Stolen Conch Shell. You are tasked with solving a mystery, there are multiple suspects (about 8 I think?) and...the culprit is different every time you play! Throughout the point-and-clicking of the game, the clues will be different, leading you to different suspects (and even different areas) but also some clues may be the same -- overlapping possible suspects to keep things from being so cut-and-dry. As far as games for kids go, it circled the replayability square very adequately.
I don’t understand Yahtz’s gripe with Pentiment not telling you if you’re correct initially, because the game does in fact make all your choices crystal clear at the end
