Mystery games are great. They appeal to something primal within each of us, a deep yearning to understand the nuances of the worlds we choose to immerse ourselves in. Each of us wants to discover something, to have that moment where a lightbulb goes off and everything makes sense. Indeed, I’d argue this desire to learn, to understand, and to master is what lies at the heart of most games, with mystery games just being the most transparent about it.
This sensation and need to understand and have that cathartic moment where everything makes a little more sense is still present in Death in the Manor, don’t get me wrong. However, instead of that catharsis coming from solving a mystery and knowing who dunnit, that sensation is driven by needing to understand this game and the choices it has made.
Why, for instance, in a murder mystery game, is there only the barest hint of a mystery?
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3652412330
Death in the Manor is a point and click game. You play as a detective tasked with solving the murder of some procedurally generated victim in his procedurally generated house. The detective moves through a house, rummaging through boxes, hemming over notes, and chatting with potential murderers until the solution to the mystery reveals itself.
From that description, you might think this is a murder mystery game. It is not. There is a murder, yes, and it’s unclear who the murderer is, sure, but there is no mystery to solve. What there is is an endless number of random things to click until the glowing, light-up item is found and the detective makes his happy “aha” noise. There are no red herrings, no deduction, nothing but clicking and looking at fingerprints until, after enough objects are clicked and rooms entered, the mystery resolves itself.
The fundamental core of what makes a mystery game a mystery game — that fundamental satisfaction at the heart of every game — is missing. Instead, this is a game about a man wandering through a bafflingly arranged house, jotting down notes in a frenetic and disjointed journal, muttering to himself until he stumbles on to something passing for an answer after roughly fifteen minutes or so. It is not a mystery. It is barely a game.
The bigger mystery here is why this game is the way it is, and understanding that might be the only satisfaction I can get from this mess of a game.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3652412587
One of the core elements of any mystery is that there needs to be a logical solution undergirding it. Humans and their actions are fundamentally rational, and a sufficiently logical mind will always be able to parse through the noise to see that rationality and to reconstruct the sequence of actions that led to someone’s murder. That you could be this someone, that you could cut through that noise is part of the satisfaction of a mystery. All the veils of the universe arrayed out before you, but you, and you alone, were somehow able to pierce through.
For that satisfaction and catharsis to work, though, there does need to be a logic. There needs to be a thread that can be unravelled and a series of logical actions to be understood. If something is truly random, then no amount of logic will solve it, no matter how hard you think about the problem.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3652412798
Procedurally generated games have pros and cons. On the one hand, a procedurally generated game offers more options for replay for players who enjoy it. That the game is different on every playthrough allows for more variety and more ways to approach the game, making it almost continuously fresh and interesting. On the other hand, this randomness relinquishes much of the control over what a game actually is. Procedural generation allows details to be re-generated, but to keep the game from being a completely random mess, the overall structure has to stay the same.
This procedural generation works well in games like deckbuilders or even in a puzzle game like Blue Prince. In these games, the range of available details is broad enough that players can still find possibility within what might be random noise. Players also have the ability to filter down that noise to create something more manageable for themselves.
In a murder mystery, though, the details are the entirety of what matters. The layout of a house or the arrangement and names of suspects don’t matter. They never matter. What matters is being able to parse through multiple threads to find one true thread and unravel it. The problem with procedural generation, though, is that if randomness is allowed to take its course, procedural generation generates mysteries that are impossible, or immediately obvious, or boring, unless the parameters in which that mystery is generated are carefully controlled.
This is how you get a game like Death in the Manor. In being procedurally generated, it sacrifices any actual puzzle elements, because all effort that should have gone to developing a puzzle instead went into controlling the randomness and finding a form for it that would still generate a “mystery” reliably. The benefit of procedural generation is that the form of the puzzle itself gets shifted. If there is no puzzle at the core, then all that’s being accomplished is a waste of everyone’s time.
Death in the Manor fundamentally does not understand what makes a murder mystery game fun. In focusing on procedural generation, it makes the assumption that its audience doesn’t have enough variety of areas to wander or suspects to interrogate, and so tries to fill that gap. None of this is what makes a mystery fun. A mystery is fun when there’s a puzzle to solve. There is no puzzle in Death in the Manor. There is only a baffling house, an array of boxes and chests, and the idea that if enough of these are jangled in front of me in enough variety, I might be entertained.
And I am as entertained as the corpse on the floor.
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