This video is now super outdated! So I've made a new one, looking at games like Return of the Obra Dinn, Paradise Killer, and Shadows of Doubt. Check it out - ua-cam.com/video/I7q363Ic26o/v-deo.html
The Ace Attorney contradiction system is one of my most satisfying mechanics of all time. The entire game shifts when you catch a lie, and it unravels until the point where you're now on top catching others.
@@pelican7235 the struggle is huge for a challenging detective game, the reason they didn't want your punished as harshly because Capcom does not enjoy alienating certain player demographics.
On the other hand, sometimes you make the right conclusion from the get go and the game doesn't like that, so you present the evidence that makes the perfect sense in the end, but just not yet.
@@bboyhoyack Yeah, I agree it is frustrating when you have the answer or maybe present the correct evidence a phase too early but perhaps it can be explained by the actual in-game court system and the characters involved in it. Like Detective Gumshoe and the Judge for example aren't the brightest needles in the haystack so you gotta walk them through your deductions very slowly and almost in a childlike system. Considering you have to convince Gumshoe in some crime scene phases of the game and then the Judge in other parts it makes sense. Not to mention the prosecutors, not wanting to be convinced otherwise, will shut you down immediately unless you can without a doubt prove every little detail wrong about the suspect. So yeah, I agree it's annoying but I, in my opinion, feel like it was executed well within the game's logic and limitations.
The best detective experience is debugging code while programming. You know something is wrong, but not always where the error is or even why there is an error. You have to come up with the right tests to get the clues behind the error. And the clock is ticking because you want to finish the code in time! I don't think there's a game that matches this kind of experience. Her Story is close, but not quite there.
Old school Rainbow Six was about "programming" your squads with operation plans and then "debugging" them in the action phase until you finished the mission... and I guess not having your people die in a mission was akin to compiling without warnings, lol
There is a short detective sidequest in Bioware's star wars rpg "Knights of the old republic" on the planet dantooine where as part of your jedi training you can be asked to help solve a murder involving two potential suspects, a variety of motives, multiple methods of murder, and most crucially, you can get it wrong and it won't reset. Your incorrect deduction is treated as truth if it is reasonable enough and can result in a miscarriage of justice if you get it wrong. This gives the case significant weight despite it ultimately being entirely optional and trivial to the plot of the game. It gives you a real detective feel, especially because you don't have to do it. Whether the case is solved is entirely dependant on the players motivation to solve it and nothing else.
My bf and I played obra dinn a while ago - fantastic detective game. We solved the whole thing after probably around 12 hours of straight gameplay and damn it was SO satisfying figuring out everything basically from scratch. Absolutely no handholding, you really have to piece everything together yourself. Looking forward to similar games in the future!
There is a much larger problem you skimmed across and just overlooked. Games have no way to punish the player outside of a Game-Over, or a slap on the hand until you get the "correct" answer. Imagine if in L.A. Noire, putting away the wrong people made suspects less likely to be honest with you, or you'd have to deal with other detectives who are also moving on your crime scenes because they think they can do a better job. Or putting away too many wrong suspects led to some of them getting acquitted, and you get demoted and have to work a few other cases until you can prove you've got your skill back, or those people you put away start harassing you by paying some Guinea motherfuckers to mess with you. There's just so much room for improvement in games instead of "You chose wrong/Game Over/2 stars/That's not right/Try again."
I like this idea. LA Noire's player rankings/score is probably the worst way detective games go about the issue, in my opinion. If the player is someone who cares about getting a high score, the ideal way isn't to think harder about the game, it's to look up which option to pick in the first case, which does kind of destroy the whole detective aspect of the game.
And then you marry these ideas with the technical and financial constraints that come with developing a game, and you've got an entirely new issue on your hands. It's no surprise that most of these total sum games fall short to their more tight and focused indie counterparts.
+Beat Yer Meat! Yeah, that's something to be dealt with. It would be nice if a game was directly powered by it's analogically reality without any hardware or financial limitations. Then again................that's something that could be possible at a properly graded scale. Very interesting.
Those are all punishments you described, but what exactly does that fix about the player's experience? While those are some imaginative and immersive ideas, they sound more like a punishment for carelessness. Yeah players don't need a brick wall to run into every time they mess up, but idk how making the game harder fixes the problem of the player wanting to feel like they're figuring it out
One major problem is accessibility. The developers are trying to strike a balance between challenge and solvability. Players have to be able to make the connections. If they're too difficult people won't be able to progress and quit playing
yeah but you game that requires x time and x budget to do, now needs 10x that because the game actually have 10 times more content. That is not a viable solution in most of the cases
Erika the problem is that would only work if the cases were built to be randomly generated. That means that evidence would also have to be random and so would dialog exposing contradictions. Writing would be affected because you wouldn't be crafting a mystery, but giving 10 possible murder weapons, 10 perpetrators, 10 generic lies and 10 generic witnesses/evidence that contradict the lies in every case.
Hopefully this comment won't get buried, but a great UA-camr called Mr Wendal made a similar video called "Games That Make You Feel Like Sherlock". Your videos share some similar ground but both make unique points. Cheers Mark.
I don't have much to say, but I just wanted to let you know that someone else (me) found your comment. I'll definitely be checking Wendal's channel out, I haven't seen it before.
I remember probably my favorite moment came not from an entire game, but part of it; that being the first Deus Ex game. There's a scene before one of the final maps in the campaign storyline where you rest over at someone's estate before venturing via aircraft to your next destination. There's just enough in the way of clues to figure out that his pilot is an impostor, a fake that plans on killing you and was only recently replaced, though the game plans for you to miss this and reacts accordingly if you do. However, I caught these clues and with no dialogue path or environmental option to progress this story, killed the man on the spot. It incited outrage in my host, but there was in fact a follow-up conversation that revealed the entire thing. Not only was nothing handed to me in the situation, but I acted on my instincts and was rewarded by the game acknowledging my deductions and rewarding my decision making. Definitely a top-ten gaming moment for me.
3 years ago but, it's a mechanic actually. I remember I was suspicious so I went back to talk to the estate owner and eventually knocked out the mechanic
@@UCJGcfCpKFcTpkGSHEEKhKwQ Oh you remind of Assassin's Creed: Revelations, where I was looking around for an ax that I had dropped during a skirmish while a large crowd looked on. Nothing was out of the ordinary until I realized that one guy was programmed with a strange body language. It caught my attention. And I turned on the intention sensor. It was an assassin armed with a *knife* !
I'm planning to create a detective mystery solving game. This was EXACTLY what I needed. I was having a hard time thinking of what type of game mechanic that couldn't be brute forced. I want the players to deduce outside the game and this helped me a whole lot. Thanks!
This video is a masterpiece. It tackles an interesting and underexplored topic, breaks it down with an intelligent framework (the stages of good detective work in media), provides loads of relevant examples from multiple genres and outside of the usual popular AAA games, and delivers everything smoothly with well-selected clips, high production values, and careful pacing. The video draws so many interesting connections it feels like the product of good detective work itself!
I agree entirely. This curatorial approach is so useful especially in a world of so many games. The examination of the best aspects from many games can really inform developers and have an impact on future games. I hope you continue the trend of larger curatorial works like this.
I agree.. all these videos are basically all the things I've been fascinated about with video game design and no one has really tackled in any real depth, or if they did it's hidden in some research paper somewhere. Really appreciate the channel!
My favorite detective/murder mystery game of all time also happens to be my favorite point and click adventure game: The Colonel's Bequest. I loved that it lets you beat the game having no idea what is actually going on, but then gives you small hints at the end that make you realize that replaying it and looking harder to try to understand what actually happened is totally worth it. I also love the fact that it is more focused on people and their relationships to one another instead of just solving little archaic puzzles. Absolutely brilliant game design for the time.
This video pulls on a ridiculous repertoire of detective games. Colour me impressed, I thorougly enjoy good detective stories but have never found detective games compelling. The evidence often feels unnaturally compelling (handholdy) or I find myself not properly motivated by the story, call me picky. I just want an orient express or small village constable story with a reasonable cast of characters you can interact with and a properly open investigation where the player can be interviewing all the wrong people and looking for clues in all the wrong places.
Also there is a rule that I use in righting my detective role play campaigns. It is called "The 3 clue rule": for every conclusion that you want the players to reach you have to have at least 3 clues. A lot of detective games don't do that. They just have one path they expect you to follow. And that is less deduction and more guessing game.
and to expand on this rule, If a clue MUST be present to progress a story make it the 4th and let the game help the player. Like a certain person calls you to tell you that s-/he has seen x at y. Or a certain piece of evidence has been found.
Thanks for posting that. This is a great video, but I think it's worth it for video games to look at pen-and-paper RPGs for inspiration and vice versa - this is a conondrum that both face. It's worth noting that Robin D. Laws is considered one of the greatest RPG designers of the modern times, and his most famous creation, GUMSHOE, was created pretty much exclusively to solve this problem - and the article linked argues, quite effectively in my opinion, that it doesn't.
If only they didn't provide some critical evidence only after the trial starts. At least it doesn't happen all the time, but still alibis and accounts are often unknown until the trial starts.
The Danganronpa series are some of my favorite detective games, because, although their Investigate! sequences are rather rail-roaded, the class trials allow you to use the clues you have to shoot through the weaknesses in your classmates' arguments. Most of the trials also do a really good job at walking you through the logic of the case, so that you don't figure it all out too early, but instead figure it out moments before the protagonist does (the first game isn't as good at this, as some of the cases are REALLY easy (i.e. 11037 is not hard to figure out for people who use the Latin alphabet regularly), but DR2 and DRV3 have some absolutely brilliant trials).
I think Danganronpa is also good at simulating arguments that tend to heat up (with the various ways the speech sentences move on the screen) and involve whispering (with the White Noise) and somehow cutting through those to make your point heard (which is pretty important considering the protagonists tend to be someone who doesn't stand out). Wrong decisions can cause the participants their lives, after all, so it's natural for some of them to panic or be more aggressive, and I think Danganronpa's argument system excels at selling this point.
The difficulty is dumbed down considerably and almost artificially. Allow players to pick any evidence instead of a set list, remove the question-answer (psyche taxi, logic dive, others asking you questions in-between debates) minigames altogether. They're all trivial anyway. ----- SPOILERS ----- Also, during Danganronpa V3's first murder I immediately thought "The Mastermind is the killer and he just escaped through the secret door". Which is exactly what happened. But nobody (including the allegedly Ultimate Detective) even CONSIDERED this possibility during the first trial. OTOH I like that they do fewer flashbacks and less hand-holding in V3. Some important pieces of evidence may not even appear in the clues list and we only have Shuichi's incredible memory to thank for some solved cases. Of course it should be the player's memory instead.
Great video Mark. I am glad there are other gaming journalists who really enjoy detective games, and hope they are done more often. Maybe we should all band together and make one :P
I think the best way to improve detective games is somethings that most game don't do, that is allow you to fail, not only that, not even let you know that you have miss interpreted something. The same way in Xcom or DarkestDungeons you have to roll with the punches, in a mystery scenario the story should develop itself... get closer to the answer and the culprit starts to get nervous, maybe he commits another crime or tries to flee or destroys some evidence... get further from the answer and the culprit tries to make you follow a red herring. And that's just things you can do with the culprit, in a good story you can have other "players", maybe you have a detective rival, or a family member of the victim out on revenge (probably against an unsuspecting innocent). The key things is that this things should be tied to how well you are doing your investigation. Maybe is time based, some clues get lost (something in the trash-can get thrown with the rest of the garbage), witnesses get cold feet, etc.
Not only do I tend to feel this isn't very fun, I worry about just how elitist it is. There's an increasing sense among better players in gaming to look at the experiences of frustrated, mediocre players, and say "Well, it's *your fault* then, because you did X. The game itself is fine." I may be different, but I view fun failure scenarios as an equally integral part of good game design. If I get spotted by a guard, changing the stealth situation into a permanently active chase/search eg Batman is a lot more fun than sitting in a closet and waiting for an unbeatable squad to go home, eg Metal Gear Solid. I really feel that the amount of increased enjoyment someone can get by having consequences of failure hammered home are really minimal. And of course, the effects on less competent players are profound. I really worry that the reason that someone wants consequences in games is not so their own experience will be more fun, but so that they can brag about it, and demean players that they feel "are dumbing down gaming by not being able to figure these things out". Given how competitive people are in online multiplayer games, I don't feel my worries are unfounded. Having unspoken failures also negates the ability for slower learners to correct their behaviors into thinking along the right track. It's pretty typical in an action game for most deaths to be towards the beginning when someone doesn't really "get" how this game works - then, once they've worked it out, they can fight with general competency, but not until then. In a detective game, maybe someone really didn't understand how the game's deduction system works, and makes a lot of bad guesses - the game wouldn't even be helping them along by having the script keep rolling through.
Basically you're saying that games should be dumbed down to the lowest common denominator, because... reasons? Never ever have I heard of the same argument used for books or movies. "This book contains too many words and 2 different languages in it, mediocre readers would be confused!" Games are art and should be treated as such. Not every game has to be appealing and "fun" for everyone.
I like the idea of failure being an option, but I think it should still be able to point out at least some of your mistakes. I think of the old 'Where in the USA is Carmen Sandiego' game I used to have on floppy when I was a kid. If you screwed up by going to too many wrong locations and missing your deadline or by not getting a warrant before catching the criminal, then you failed and the criminal escaped. But the game would let you know when you were in the wrong place or would tell you that you needed to have a warrant to actually arrest them, so you could try to adjust that kind of thing in the future. If you keep failing and the game never finds a way to suggest what you are doing wrong, then you may not be able to figure out what to correct (this is assuming the game is decent enough to have complexities, so the mistake isn't just immediately obvious to anyone without any prompting).
What if the detective game had a system akin to the Bombers' Notebook from Majora's Mask? Except that gets filled automatically as you play. A Notebook that doesn't as much give you clues what to do, but rather keep track of what events happened when. It would only update with stuff you actually experience in that session, allowing you to backtrack down your current timeline and figure out why something ended up the way it ended up. Possibly keeping track of past branches too. As is, it would be too crude to work, but it might be a concept that can be adopted and further developed made to work for detectives.
Extra Credits talked about the "basic literacy" effect. If you can read decently, you can read War and Peace. You may not understand a lot of it and it may take a while, but you can at least read it. However, no book or movie is going to shut off and refuse to let you continue because you're not "literate enough" in its medium. Moreover, it's impossible to waste an entire afternoon reading the wrong direction in a book. Both of these are things that just make the experience worse for lots of people, and don't even improve the experience for those not getting tripped up. I'm seeing a lot of this throwaway argument that "not all games have to be fun for everyone". It's about as logical as getting a request from a colorblind user to allow for options to be changed, and replying "Screw you, not all games have to be fun for everyone." People are more intelligent than you give them credit for, but some people simply learn more slowly, and it's always worthwhile to analyze that mental approach, and give it space. If you couldn't make a game that is enjoyable to both master detectives and gaming amateurs, I would say it's either because you're not being a creative enough game designer, or because the master player feeds off of the bad experiences of others.
These are things I've thought of myself, and the real issue is that you basically have to give the player a "soft conclusion" almost like a soft failure state. Because the only way you can be certain is based on the evidence, not the game prompting you with congratulations. If you have a "hard conclusion" for the case, then that means the player has to be in the exact same headspace as the designer, which often goes wrong. There's multiple times during the ace attorney series where I understand how the case went, but don't understand which piece of evidence they want when there's multiple pointing towards the same thing. If multiply the possible factors you should be juggling in a real detective game, it would easily be 50 times more than in an ace attorney game, and trying to be as specific would be aggravating. There's tools I've thought about that I found interesting, which is a virtual evidence board. Instead of the game checking whether you're right, you're checking whether evidence matches, so you've got the crime itself, a murder, tied to a murder weapon, and the murder can be given a hypothetical summary, like 'a crime of passion' which can check against the people you've questioned, giving them profiles, summarizing who they are, what they do, possible motive, personality - if you feel how emotional or impulsive someone is, fits the description of the crime. The notes you write yourself. And every topic of discussion and piece of evidence can be discussed with everyone, as opposed to 4 multiple context choices, and every comment is added as a note to the topic for later review, automatically giving plenty of information to juggle, and notes to compare like in contradiction.
Although L.A. Noire is not perfect I really liked how you can solve the case in multiple ways in case you do something wrong or miss something. It also gives a great feeling, because a real detective wouldn't give up or try again over and over after a witness stops talking to you or something. Of course this can be used to go the "easy" route, but I think an important part of a detective game is the aspiration to solve it your own way.
This is why I like Her Story. There's little to no external feedback, and the game more or less doesn't even care if you even understood what you spent 4 or 5 hours hunting for clues about. Yet its one of the most engaging experiences I've ever seen in a game because its all player controlled. I choose my investment and all the information is in my head. I have to make every decision and at every decision the game's only feedback is more cryptic clues for me to decipher.
Yes the one thing i did not like in this video is avoiding brute forcing a puzzle. Games cost a ton of money to make and trying to have so many answers is very costly Imagine how much longer La noire would of taken with all the voice lines they would of needed to record. It's just not cost effective. but other then that "brute forcing" puzzles happens in real life not everyone gets the right answer on the 1st try.
Sky Cap You don't really need to have a different voice line for every possible incorrect solution, a simple "I don't think that'd hold up in court" would do for all incorrect final solutions without giving away if you have the wrong guy or just lacked evidence. In real life, detectives really want to avoid getting the case incorrect because it could ruin their reputation or get them fired if they screw up enough. That isn't a real worry when you're playing a video game because it'd be dumb to lock you out of the game and restarting part of or the entire case would be pointless since you'd already know what to do unless they have a new case randomly generated (which would be even more work than having all those failure dialogs you mentioned).
I like this plan, but it runs the risk of flooding the player with information and making them feel overwhelmed. There are a couple solutions to that, from keeping the maximum number of variables relatively low to allowing players to kind of... "favourite" for lack of a better term, specific notes or pieces of evidence they think are important so that they can easily be re-accessed later. Something we also have to remember is dev time, it's already really hard just to write a good mystery with no plotholes, but writing a good mystery that can be solved in multiple similar ways without having any accidental red herrings or pieces that actually fit but aren't accounted for is a mind-bending task. If one were to attempt this, one would probably have to re-imagine how we organize all the different elements that go into a game. Ambitious, but not impossible.
Ok going into this video I was like, "He's not going to mention Hotel Dusk/Last Window" but then you use the music at 01:40 and I got chills. No one appreciates these games as they should.
Cing was bought by Arc System Works and under their name they released another game on 3DS called Chase: Cold Case Investigations - Distant Memories. It's really short, but kind of like seeing an old friend again.
I loved those games. While not technically "the best" detective games out there, everything surrounding the game (character design, music, overall look and feel, etc) made it two of my favorite games on the DS.
That remind me when I accused a NPC of being a murderer in The Witcher 1. My suspect, a fence, told me conflicting stories and suspicious lies thus I accused him and move on with my game. Thing got very awkward later when I discoverd that he was in fact part of the Royal Secret Police and that was the reasons for his lies. I dicovered I was wrong but I had good reason to be. Good stuff for a investigation in a RPG .
Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective is a fantastic game. It's one of my favorites. But despite it's name, it is NOT a detective game. It's a fun puzzle game, with a fantastic story and characters, and I absolutely recommend it, but it is not a detective game.
Has anyone else played *Why Am I Dead At Sea* ? It's a cool game where you play as a ghost on a ship that was recently murdered, and you have to figure out how you were killed by possessing the other passengers on the ship. It's super low budget, but still has pretty solid writing and design. The thing that's most relevant to this video though, is that you spend most of the game just gathering evidence without having to make any big deductions and then at the end it's up to you to put the evidence together correctly. The game has multiple endings, so if you fail to put the evidence together properly you'll end up with only half the mystery solved and a "I guess we'll never know" for the rest of it. I had to replay the final scene a couple of times before I got the true ending because it actually expects you to use your intelligence to some extent. Worth checking out imo.
Aww man, I wish he had mentioned the Nancy Drew point-and-click games! Those were hard! You really had to look for evidence- it felt so rewarding when you finally got a lead to follow.
I've only played a few, but I do like how they games focus on puzzles, but some of the best clues, I don't recall being brought attention too, so you can miss them if you aren't paying attention.
Kid me was fucking stuck on those games, while my mom, who was a mystery nut was just standing in the corner facepalming like🤦🏽♂️ 😂, i was stubborn but i just couldnt finish em.
Surprised that you didn't include - Sherlock Holmes: The Silver Earring. That was the one game which made me play with pen and paper ready. It forced you to make your own deductions; you had to answer the question of 'whodunnit' at the end; picking from all the people you've interacted with. Hence I think what makes a good detective game is this: The game progresses as events unfold and new evidence is collected. But there are no deduction mini-games between chapters which hold your hand throughout. You make your own deductions, note them down and come up with the truth at the very end.
My favourite is SH crimes and punishment. That game actually allowed you to be a detective and had least amount of mindless puzzles. In crimes and punishments you can actually be wrong and accuse wrong suspect and end the case. Player freedom and no hand holding is something we rarely see in games nowdays. Especially a detective game should never hold your hand or have a linear structure. Imo a linear structure totally misses the point of solving the case. It becomes more like following the case.
The Silver Earring definitely has one of the best deductive gameplay in a detective game in a long time...you're given a quiz at the end of each section and you need to not only answer either yes or no, you also need to find the evidence or testimony that proves your point, which definitely made guesswork very difficult. It still has the problems Mark mentioned in which you're still prompted by the text of the question and there are still the usual point-and-click issues of pixel hunting and certain puzzles with solutions that don't really make sense. However, the game does make up for it with the optional bonus quiz at the very end in which the game challenges you to use all the answers, evidence, and deductions you've made to try and solve the whole thing. And the best part is, the game never tells you outright if you're right or wrong by taking that quiz. It simply goes on and you see the final cutscene giving the entire answer...if you got it right in the quiz, you'll feel pretty smart. But you're not punished for getting it wrong.
I’ve just started playing Disco Elysium and so far it seems really good. You’re not guided too much and where you get a list of “goals” noted down much of them are optional and some possibly bad for you. For example (Go buy a bottle of booze). So you have goals written down but you have to choose as a player which ones you will achieve. Also, your character has different traits and skills. There are three pre-made options or you can roll your own like in DnD. With each char they know different things or have different abilities so the way you can solve things changes.
Crucially, Disco Elysium also lets you fail checks. You can fuck up certain leads and things if you're unlucky or tackle them at a bad time, but because you know there are multiple possible clues, it always feels like its in your hands. Love that game
There's one key aspect of investigative work which is quite evident in the clips from Mystic River (and a number of other films, Zodiac being a prime example) and which is not mentioned in the video. It's in the first clip you show: Fishburne asks Bacon a why the victim swerved without hitting the brakes, Bacon answers. The two detectives are working together to come to a conclusion. When one makes a hypothesis, the other one tests it. It's quite strange to me why this is not used in games. Especially in something like L.A. Noire, which goes to great lengths to provide you with partners. These partners proceed to contribute exactly nothing worthwhile to your investigations. The main issue detective games have is feedback - you think you're on to something but you have no way of testing it. Wouldn't it be more satisfying if in L.A. Noire you could first present your hypotheses to your partners? You'd still have to get the confession out of the suspect, but you would run the evidence by your partner who might dismiss it, confirm it, or even lead you to another clue. You'd at least know whether your idea of how the crime happened was feasible. Since the feedback would remove a lot of the "WTF am I supposed to be doing?" frustration, it would allow you to have more clues and therefore more variables. The cases could be harder, because you'd no longer be required to figure it out while completely in the dark as to whether you're on the right track - which isn't to say that you couldn't. Of course, it wouldn't have to be limited to testing your theories, it could be brainstorming and arriving to a conclusion just like in the scene from Mystic River. A dialogue tree, except one where you're not prying information from someone, but rather trying to figure something out, with the partner possibly providing more clues, or at least more ideas. Could you brute-force it like that? Sure, I guess, but it would be more realistic (and movie-like) than brute-forcing it by loading a save or looking up an FAQ. But games are mostly adolescent wish-fulfillment, so a game where you play as that one uber-detective who figures it all out by himself, 'cos he's the man, is probably more marketable.
This is great, although the biggest problem would be how to present the partner as having good ideas and logic, but not having them outright Sherlock-school you by having already figured it out and patiently waiting for you to catch up.
An interesting idea I had for the mechanic for the accusation part: the game could have a "reconstruction mode", sort of like a director mode, in which you get to play as all the actors involved in the protagonist's head, similar as to how tv detectives are often depicting as imagining the crime happening while examining the crime scene. You have to move around all the characters in a timeline effectively reconstructing the events before you can make the proper accusation. You also get to choose what actors are in the scene, as well as what they were doing. Maybe this mode could be used midgame to spot missing pieces of the puzzle, prompting the progress on the story. Progressively you "unlock" more actors that can appear in that scene, and eventually evolve your reconstruction from a simple conjecture that invites you to dig deeper in a certain direction, to a more complex scene that you can use as your accusation.
@@axelpetersson5787 Reminds me a bit of the Memory Remix mechanic in Remember Me (although with a different objective) - I'd happily play a whole game of that.
I think this would be great in a VR game! Rather than having a limited number of options of things to interact with, etc. you can incorporate actual physics, make everything touchable and there would be no special controls to have to design or button prompts because--it's VR! Pick something up, throw it, stab somebody, it's all there
I think LA Noire was really a missed opportunity in a lot of ways. They put in all the work to make a big open world game and then gave no incentive to explore it instead of just fast travelling. The moment someone mentions something, it's added to your map and you can just appear there. I think it would have felt better if you actually had to figure out whew locations were and then go find them yourself, and for the game to not just scribble every significant piece of information down in a nice filtered list. It feels less like you're leading the investigation and more like you're just being given a quick quiz to make sure you were paying some attention. In the same way, I think it would be good if games didn't reveal information in a linear way. A lot of the detective games I've played follow a system of putting you in a place with evidence and not letting you proceed with the game at all until you've found it. Then when you do find it, you move on to one specific other place and repeat. The game is implicitly telling you that there is more evidence in this spot and then that you've got it all, which is not information available to the character. In LA Noire, it's also the case that all the evidence is important so you aren't collecting anything that's redundant or a red herring. There are few irrelevant items at the scene, the ones that are there tend to repeat in many locations (cigarette boxes and bottles) and Cole pretty much immediately says "this isn't important" when you pick it up. Again, this is the gameplay system providing you with more information than you should have. When you pick up something and Cole doesn't poo poo it, you know you'll need to twist and turn it to find something out about it. It would be great if the game let you collect loads of useless evidence and let you figure out which ones are important yourself, or if there was evidence that might he useful but not necessary if you work out the problem some other way, rather than working it out the exact one way that the developer thought of. In my inexperienced opinion, this kind of stuff shouldn't be too difficult to improve. I think the main reason they don't is because they don't want players to get stuck because it is true that the more complicated you make a game, the fewer the people will be able to actually finish it. But even then it could be offset by a mechanic like a partner pointing out clues or making speculations with varying degrees of specificity depending on the difficulty. Like on the highest difficulty you get no direct help and on the lowest difficulty they figure out most of the stuff and let you just do the kind of selection games you see in a lot of the standard detective games.
Believe it or not, many people don't finish complicated games and they bad mouth it to others. You can be a hard-core detective wanna be but the majority of game players just want to get a taste and feel the experience. It doesn't have to be 100% realistic. It's the rush that makes people purchase these games, not overly realistic setup and game mechanics. If you want to sell a lot of games, you have to lower the barriers not raise them.
@@bluerabbit1236 Completely agree, which is perhaps why the detective genre (the most mental of all genres) struggles to adjust to the gaming medium, because simply put, people prefer witnessing intelligence through the character rather than utilising their own. This is a tragedy because ultimately the appeal of detective games is illustrating how logical processes can make sense of chaotic worlds, which is far more rewarding when it is actually earned. Players going for jazz music, trenchcoats and murder mysteries set themselves up to be disappointed because they either expect the character to solve it for them or for the puzzle to be easier.
This video got me thinking about a Text Adventure I played a while back called ''Make it Good' by Jon Ingold. It's a typical detective game in that you interview witnesses and gather clues, but if you just blindly go about solving puzzles and trying to progress in the game without paying attention to the story, you will miss the fact there are subtle hints throughout saying that the story is not what you think. You can progress all the way to an end without the game telling you that you've screwed up, as would happen in real life, but you have to pay attention and make different not-so-obvious actions to complete your actual objective to get the best ending for your character
Funnily enough, the best "Eureka!" moment I've ever had in a game was in Persona 4. It's a JRPG/Life sim with a murder-mystery plot, and because you don't constantly focus on the latter I think it actually makes for the best implementation of a murder mystery. Movies like Mystic River or Seven or anything like that usually feel like one continuous search for the answer, but really they just cut out the down time. That's fine in a movie because A) they need the wrap it up in 2 hours or less and B) the audience doesn't have to solve the mystery. Whenever you have to do some heavy-duty problem solving in real life, it's beneficial to not ram your head against a wall when you're stuck; it's better to take your mind off of it for a bit and come back to it fresh. This gives your brain time to process all the information and make some subconscious connections. That's what the Eureka moment is, and it's really difficult to have it when you actively engaged in it. Because Persona 4 has so much more emphasis on your daily routine and solving more immediate problems (which all factor into the mystery, that's an important part), you have time to let you thoughts develop and when some very spoiler-y decisions come up late in the game, you not only have the info you need you've also had the time to actually understand your circumstances. I've had moments in L.A. Noire where I probably did have all the info I needed, but because there was little down time between the finding the clues and finding the culprit, I wasn't deep enough in the case to really be satisfied with it. Persona 4 lays out most of the clues early on, then asks you like 70 hours later to solve the case. I wasn't 100% sure up until the end, but once the plot came into focus again it all clicked. It's a crazy sensation, and that's what mystery and detective games should strive for in my opinion.
I'm not really sure if its a GOOD detective example, but the quest "One for My Baby" in Fallout New Vegas is one of my favourite detective-like things in any game. Sure its rather short, but the first time I did it I was quite engaged in solving the murder.
I think Orwell deserves a mention as its one of the most engaging deduction based games there is, just like a real detective you spend your time piecing together clues and fragments of information. Your brain really starts to frantically connect dots that might not even be there, its truly amazing, just thought it would be worth a mention.
Contradiction is SO GOOD! FMV is really a wonderful way to explore mystery and horror. You can really get attached to the characters if the acting & writing is good and can also use an actor’s performance as a way to detect lies. Such a fun space to play in.
Just recently started playing "Shadows of Doubt" and I'm genuinely surprised on how many levels its hits on what makes a good detective game, particularly how it overcomes the unique challenge of replayability. The process requires that you take notes, either through the in-game mechanic or with whatever you have on by. From what I can tell, because of the many features that go into detective mechanics, it's most likely going to be the case that these games will be low-resolution indie products with detailed mechanics and not expansive open-world action RPGs. At least for a while that is. Personally, I prefer small well- detailed products rather than large open-world empties. There are several things this game hits on: The use of tools and different methods to collect evidence. Also, lots of interactivity. Any angle you approach it at can work so long as you are finding the evidence and matching up the clues. Plus I enjoy how they approached the whole tutorial process of narrowing the paths at the beginning to then widening further as you get a more proper understanding of the mechanics. (Observation: For more developed detective game mechanics, the more learning the player is going to have to do, which is a fair trade-off for the player, it should be the most mental of all the genres). There is no player and game mistranslation, if you have a hunch that it may potentially be said person, you are within your right to break into their house, collect some evidence, confront them and so on, you aren't forced to any procedural path. The only downfalls are the dialogue system which still serves as a function within the game but isn't as merely refined as other games which made that mechanic a lot more of their focus. This by default encourages the player to stop asking for an answer and instead find it through other means (realistic vs unrealistic? up to you).
Her Story was such an experience. I sat down with my girlfriend and we grabbed a pile of papers and wrote down timelines, ideas, possible searchwords and so on. I just love games that are be able to make you actually DO things in the real world to progress in the game itself.
I agree with a lot of your criticisms of L.A. Noire, but I really feel like you ignored one of its best features, which are interrogations. You really have to be paying attention to the story to know whether their statement is a Truth, Doubt, or Lie. (Obviously the facial expressions at the beginning of the game give some of these away, but that's just to teach you how to play.) You can really get penalized for choosing the wrong response, including missing some helpful or valuable evidence, which can ultimately alter your total understanding of the case. The options to choose from, in my opinion, are lengthly enough to deter mere guess and check gameplay. It's probably the best part of the game, and I think it's worth mentioning.
1+ After finishing watching the video i feel like he underestimated or ignored a lot of things in L.a noire which is kinda shame because I think L.a noire is the closest thing we can get.
As I recalled if you gather enough evidence you could just called lies on everyone, and if they have something to do with the case, they would almost everytime say "I hoped you have evidence to prove that". If they dont say anything related to the case, you can take back the accusation with no regrets. The best part of the game however was when you are investigating the case for the fire department of the Elysian Fields.
LA Noire notoriously changed the choices from coax, force, and lie to truth, doubt, lie. This lead to a lot of confusion when playing. With the possibility to end the case by accusing the wrong person, that was a bit rough and frustrating. The recent Sherlock Holmes games also let you make the wrong decisions and proceed, but you can back up and choose a different option later. I liked the interogation in LA Noire in theory, but not how it ended up there. Maybe if you could come at things from more angles or try again somehow.
@@IBRHEEMGT9600 LA noire is garbage, the story jumps around, just teleports you mid cases. Doesnt let you solve cases, nor go back to look up at certain evidences becaused you talked to the person and they confesed or whatver, the plot needs to go foward. What is it good to have top acting, if you cant play the game because the plot goes foward or whatever. I dont mind to accuse the wrong person. But i will never forgive the game for not letting me go back to look at stuff like a real detective and just jump story to a new point, where you asking yourself wtf...
This is the first time I've seen Discworld Noir mentioned anywhere other than a let's play. It's one of my favourite games and I really wish there were more games like it!
Thank you for this video. We used the idea of writing the clues for our latest game, Void Mine. The dynamic of the game is that you have to read crew journals spread across a space station to deduce the access password to the next level and type it into a console. All this while something is chasing you.
For *"Picking up clues/lead"* , a lot of hacking games do that. There was a little adventure game on Android called *Hack Run* that had pick up clues through downloading documents and using your command console to search further. I believe it's also use in the recent Orwell as well.
Not a detective game but I always liked that in the beginning of Metal Gear Solid 2 you had to take the pictures yourselves to gather evidence on the MG's existence. It's more of a private investigator thing as it's basically spying, but I think it's interesting to dissociate the more lawful kind of detectives who are most likely cops, and the ones that are more in the "means to an end" camp, which allows more freedom in term of gameplay possibilities. A good exemple of this kind of "gathering evidence" situations in a game is the Pictobox subquest in Zelda Wind Waker where you have to secretly take a picture of a dude at the exact moment he put a letter in a mailbox. I'm sure pictures evidence has been used in a lot of detectives games but I think it's interesting to look at "detective mechanics" that are used in/come from other genres. Like Morrowind and its keywords system used to talk with NPCs, which is pretty similar to the search entries that you can use in Her Story while actually interacting with characters. A lot of games that put isolation in a dangerous place at the core of them tend to have some kind of "immersive investigation", games like Metroid Prime, Resident Evil, Dark Souls, or most Immersive sims. These games tend to put you in a place where things went really bad which is the reason of your isolation in the game. They are not really "mystery games" since to unveil the causes of what went wrong is not really the point, but they all have this idea that something bad happened a long time ago, and if you're curious enough you can explore, read or listen to stuff and if you link the pieces together you will get the bigger picture, thus giving you more context for the things that you do in the game (escaping a place full of zombies for RE1, wandering on a desert planets full of mysterious ruins for Metroid Prime...). You could imagine a story where you need to investigate the old murder of a guy that lived in the Ancient Greece or something, but that stuff happened a long time ago so you need to learn more about the history of the victim with the rest of the world etc, but you need to do that while all the key characters are dead and buried. Well, that's just a random idea but you see the point, that's basically how these games investigations work. However these kind of detective work tend to obviously lack the element of questionning witnesses, as the whole point is that stuff went bad so long ago that there is no one to interrogate anymore. This is why one could just simply call that "exploration" or "environmental storytelling" in a game, but I still think the parallel is interesting to think about. Mystery/Detective movies are interesting to rewatch because you can see situations from a different angle with the whole story in mind, but a detective game is not only about watching the story, you also need to play it. But then it makes you wonder : as detective games are basically big puzzle games, how do you make them replayable once you already know the answers? I can replay something like Uncharted because even though I already played it, it feels fresh to just shoot bad dudes. A detective game though is entirely built around the notion that you are looking for something/someone or that you are trying to get an information. The whole juice of the game resides in answering questions ("how do I get that info out of him?" "What object did he use?" "Why did he do that?" and so on) through interaction, but once the answers are already in your mind the interaction can become kind of meaningless. To continue with the action games comparison, the moment where you find an answer in a mystery game is like the moment where you hit an enemy in an action game, however in that case you can watch the attack animation of your character, followed by the hit animation of the enemy, all of that enhanced by visual and sound effect, over and over again because its appeal comes from a purely sensory experience. The satisfaction that you get from discovering something can only be felt once though. Well, that didn't stop me from playing the Ace Attorney games a couple of times each but still :p
As for replayability, resourceful developers could make detective/mystery arcs into a larger open-world game rather than building a single game around the core plot/genre. Like in Morrowind, your character is not hard-chained to some imperial law enforcer identity and you may approach the case however you want. The outcomes could vary due to different skill levels, perks or abilities as well. Discovering combinations of in-game elements that lead to unique dialogues and plot twists is one attraction in open-world games. Besides that, there are many other things to do, like the action play you mentioned, or being a master thief (which could somehow blend with detective arcs if the developers so wish). That said, a game focusing on mystery/detective aspects probably won't ever excel a blockbuster open-world game in replayability. Yep. Some games are meant to be like this, and that doesn't make them worse.
I feel like a game where after collecting clues, the world opens up to whatever area you are in (a huge city with hundreds of residents and conversations) however, only a few are needed to solve the case. You can question anyone, but again.. not everyone will know anything. You analyse clues and track suspects down to their house (perhaps through some kind of database search or something) and so on, with a dedicated notepad to write all your ideas. Not only should this (in my opinion) provide a satisfying true detective experience, it would also be great for people who want to be fully immersed. If the game sticks to the same location but with different cases it shouldn’t be too large of a file. Then again, I know nothing about programming and I could be making a laughing stock of myself but. If it is possible, I’d love to see it happen
Sixteen Suggestions/Observations people made about what makes a Good Detective Game: 1. The best detective game experience is about figuring out the solution to the case by oneself and having the freedom to do so, without the frustration of not being able to communicate that to the game. 2. There are no contemporary game mechanisms to portray hard physical evidence-based deduction. To improve the accusation and proof aspect, the player should go on a full reenactment of what they think the perpetrator did, unlocking more resources and guides during the investigation. 3. Most detective games make the player inhabit a character with distinct thought patterns and reasoning skills, rather than relying on the player's own logic. The audience often appreciates being a witness to a character's intelligence rather than trying to use their own. 4. It is important for the solution to be easy enough for most players to find out, and games should hint at the solution in subtle ways. Too many options can lead to frustration and players resorting to looking up the answer online, so a good detective game should balance guiding the player towards the solution and letting them find it themselves. 5. Good detective games should be open-world and not linear, with the player driving to the scene, searching for clues, talking to people, and connecting the dots on their own without hand-holding. 6. The interactivity of a detective game is an important feature, and limiting it makes the game less immersive. 7. A good detective game should allow the player to solve the case through observation, with the player finding things, hearing character thoughts, building theories, and seeing them either confirmed or denied before moving on to the next mystery. The whole story is only revealed at the end of the mystery. 8. A good detective game should progress as new evidence is collected, without deduction mini-games between chapters holding the player's hand. The player should make their own deductions, note them down, and come up with the truth at the end. 9, A suggestion to include a detective partner in the game who can aid in deduction and provide hints, as seen in the movie Mystic River. The partner could also help to break up any boredom or loneliness that may be present in detective games. 10. A suggestion is to include a "reconstruction mode" where the player can play as all the actors involved in the crime scene to reconstruct the events and make a proper accusation. This mode can be used to spot missing pieces of the puzzle and unlock more actors that can appear in the scene. 11. The player should be able to play past their mistakes to a certain point, where accusing the wrong person has consequences that affect future investigations. The flaw with many games is that the game doesn't allow the story to continue if the deduction is not correct, which often means forcing one singular answer to the problem. 12. Players should be rewarded for being the detective character and presented with fascinating, bold, surprising, emotional, hysterical, and deranged choices. The game should not force players to solve puzzles, and repetitive gameplay over multiple cases but rather let the player role-play one murder for 50 hours. 13. In a detective game, giving the player a "hard conclusion" can be problematic because the player has to be in the exact same headspace as the designer. A virtual evidence board and the ability to discuss every topic of discussion and piece of evidence with everyone can be useful. 14. The game should be tied to how well the player is doing their investigation, and time-based elements such as lost clues or uncooperative witnesses could be included. 15. One limitation pointed out is that detective mechanics are often limited to one method of gathering evidence, rather than utilising multiple methods and strategies to ascertain the nature of the crime. 16. A challenge with detective games is replayability once the answers have been found, as the interaction can become meaningless once the player knows the answers. The satisfaction of discovering something can only be felt once.
Ace Attorney has always been a favorite for me, but the game that really hyped me up alot while playing it was Obra Dinn. Unfolding clues and little by little identifying the crew members was a great experience.
I think that the main problem with detective video games is that a real detective is supposed to have enough experience and knowledge and to be really clever, and obviously most of the players aren't real detectives, so they don't have this skills and the game has to make and abstraction and solve most of the mistery for you. It's like how in games like Max Payne or RDR there is a bullet time to make and abstraction because their characters have really good aiming skills, but the player doesn't. The problem is that in Detective games when they solve you the mystery theyr ruin most of the interesting things of the game while in shooters with bullet time it's just another gimmick.
You make a good point. But to be honest, all games have a focus and a target audience, maybe broad, maybe not. A good detective game, one which the player *needs* to be smart, will fit with a indie developer and a small audience. A Sherlock Holmes from a big publisher will need to make compromises.
The Laura Bow games are magnificent detective experiences. In Colonels Bequest, spying on conversations can lead to finding out where to be at what time to listen in on suspects conversations. Lots of deduction and even out of game note taking gave me that rush of truly figuring things out on my own.
I love hearing you gush about Her Story. It's one of my all time favorite games and I really hope you find games inspired by it to recommend in the future.
I have more of an affinity for film rather than games, but both have played important roles in my life, and I cannot imagine that becoming any less truthful. To get to my point, I would just like to state how informative I find your series, and of course, that you've successfully presented it all in an entertaining way. I recommend you to everyone I possibly can! Thank you for what you do and never compromising quality!
A system for finding the pieces is easy. A system for putting the pieces together is what's hard. Even most of the systems for the latter process you showed were multiple choice. I don't think that's optimal, because even when you increase the number of choices, you still run the risk of giving away the answer. What might work better is a system for "reconstructing the crime scene." I.e. you can move the suspects, victims, objects and other factors around the crime scene freely, like an RTS or board game, to storyboard a scenario that doesn't contradict the evidence you've found. Finding the balance between too complicated and not complicated enough would be tricky, but I think the answer lies somewhere in this direction.
I’m a little surprised you didn’t bring up the Nancy drew computer games which use interviews, puzzles and exploration to create interesting gameplay while also using advantage of a clock system that means certain things are only available at certain times and also things like a snowstorm which will only end when you’ve successfully completed an objective and allow you to gain new areas and new information.
Interesting points. I got some ideas for a good detective game right now, but I know close to naught about game development. I wonder if I could share my ideas with someone who can realize them. So here goes nothing: 1- the player has a time limit to solve the case to be more realistic (before the date of the court hearing 4 example) and if they don't finish the case, the case is left unsolved, they lose some reputation as a detective and they take on another case (bigger cases would require a higher detective reputation/connections with police or govt officials) 2-the player would have to jot down clues they think are relevant on a piece of paper (or in-game to the notebook by adding which clues they think are important). That way it's much more intentional. Many clues are red herrings, and you don't have to use the exact same set of clues to solve the case (making everyone's experience feel unique to them). 3- by the end of the time limit (e.g. during the court hearing or the detective revealing show) the player would have to type in not just the culprit, but how, where, and when the murder was done. 4- the player can make mistakes and, depending on their current reputation and deduction, the police might believe their conclusion and arrest the wrong suspect. But it can later be revealed that the deduction was wrong. Make enough wrong deductions, and you can lose your reputation and even your license which could end the game (i.e. multiple endings) This gives the game a realistic feel and adds weight to your choices as a detective. I have more ideas I'd like to share with anyone interested.
I had to laugh at the Wolf Among Us bit; you can make some really bizarre conclusions there if you want. I think in a lot of ways there Wolf isn't really challenging the player to really investigate the murder, at least not in the way of lot of the other more straight "detective" games do; it gives you the mystery and some clues, but this is still something the game doesn't really want to force you to study. It's prodding the player to see the connection and claim responsibility for it, but the other options may as well be extended jokes. There's the one option in both bits there to actually refer to the evidence you've found, and two options to make obvious wild or shallow guesses that don't seem to have any relevance even if true. There's no reason any player genuinely trying to give an appropriate answer would pick "Murder makes him hungry"; but the option still exists so the answer isn't just "given", even if it may as well be, and so the player isn't disconnected from Bigby and put in a backseat role.
The major problem for that game was that ultimately the murder case is almost irrelevant for the story, it was more important that you didnt piss enough people off while investigating.
To be fair, that's essentially what the comics are like. Bigby solves the mystery in the very first issue and only elongates the time to flirt with the girl he likes.
Phoenix Wright has a lot of this too. To this day one of my favorite dialogue options in any game I've played is accusing a woman of eating a bone because the plate she claimed to have eating a T-bone steak off of didn't have one on it.
@@allentor2876 I also really like claiming Marvin Grossberg and Redd White are lovers or suggesting that the judge is hiding a murder weapon under his desk.
What if someone made an open world detective game full of characters, places, ect... where you have a notepad that YOU write you clues in (no pre made text written by the devs) and at the end, you would have to do a very specific set of actions that would make sense if you had really solved the crime for yourself. The game would just present you with a crime and you would do the rest like talking to characters and searching for clues. You would be pushed to explore the world and pay attention to your environment. That'd be really cool !
Well, that's exactly what Mean Streets in 1989 done (more or less). While I prefer FMV era Tex Murphy, Mean Streets is better in detective department (I once called it detective simulator). Kinda sad, that no obe mentioned that game here
Thank go I have found this video. Been studying C++ and unreal engine in hopes to make a detective game. Nothing feels better than knowing you came up with a solution from tools given. As such the game I'm making takes the world-building cues from the legend of Zelda breath of the wild in that I want to give the player tools to craft his story without it feeling preprogrammed that the right answer is a or b. I was at a stage where I was stuck. I wasn't too sure how to get this effect. This video helped a lot. I might still be on track to get a demo out by year-end. Here is to hoping :)
Totally agree with Her Story. It's the most satisfying mistery game I've ever played! I also recommend Hotel Dusk for its atmosphere, puzzles and the investigation between multiple cases and people connected in a hotel.
Witcher 1 has a fantastic detective story arch with Raymond that a whole act revolves around. You can skip right through if you go to the right place as well. The game doesn't guide you at all and can make you do some bad things all by yourself if you think about the case wrong The bit is very non-linear and is so good compared to the rest of witcher 1 lol
Also other main missions (not all) offers to freedom and choices depend on your observation. Even side quests play like that. And seeing your investigation has conclusion is amazing. Witcher 3 has too like the side quest Carnal Sins and Skellige throne missions.
This is a little late (almost exactly a year late, in fact) but one of the more interesting ways to get a 'proper' detective experience is to put the crime in the hands of another player in a sandbox environment; for example, Space Station 13. Longpost incoming. Not every round or server is going to have any crimes worth actually investigating, but when they come up it can feel extremely rewarding to piece together evidence and figure out who did the crime and how in the precious little time you're given, especially in codebases where your detective tools are cotton swabs, fingerprint powder, and tweezers for fibers instead of the handy 'do-everything' device. You can do everything from interviewing other players, to determining which pieces of evidence are actually relevant to the case, to just making wild accusations all on your own initiative, since the game is entirely a sandbox driven by the players themselves. Since this requires both having a keen eye for detail and some understanding of how the various mechanics interact with eachother, it can be difficult to actually pull off as a job, although some people make some.. weird mistakes, from my experience. As an example, I was present for a round in which a low-ranking crewmember allegedly broke into medbay and tampered with equipment. The other detective on-duty investigated the scene while the perp was being interviewed by security, and came back to analyze the evidence. On their way back, they passed the interview room, in which the perp was sitting at the table with a pair of insulated gloves, a distinctive overcoat, and a departmental uniform. Of course, the detective said he found no fingerprints belonging to non-medical personnel on the scene, and declared that the perp was not their man. I had to bring up the fact that the perp was wearing gloves and asked if they'd collected any fibers from the scene; cue the detective sheepishly coming up with an excuse about needing to 'check an airlock they'd missed on the scene' and coming back with fibers from insulated gloves, an overcoat, and the same uniform found on a number of items in medbay. For another example, I was called to a curious case involving a disembodied brain and heart that had been left out on a table in the public. Blood samples on both items identified the victim (as well as the fact that the game names each brain after the character they were taken from, doh), fibers pointed to the chief medical officer, and fingerprints pointed towards.. nobody. No records whatsoever for the recorded prints. This was kind of irritating, but I knew that this particular codebase removed crew records whenever the crewmember leaves the station by cryostorage, teleporter, or tram (kind of a pain, though), and since there wasn't a CMO aboard I knew the perp had most likely left the station. I asked around and sure enough somebody recalled there being a CMO at some point, and a quick check of the storage/departure logs in cryo, the teleporter, and the tram station told me the name of the CMO, that they'd left, and that they brought their uniform and equipment with them. I would've investigated the medbay surgery theatre to look for more evidence, but the surgeon demanded a warrant and the chief of security wasn't exactly competent, spending a few minutes milling around asking people how to write a warrant before eventually disappearing to commit suicide in her office for reasons unknown. That one was fun to figure out; the Captain called it and I found him in the office with the body handling her gun and talking about how cool it was, with the room's weapon recharger active. Asked him if it was already charging when he got there, and he told me he'd put one of the weapon's energy cells in there. Fun stuff, found his prints and uniform fibers on everything. With no other possible suspects, he would've ended up nailed to the wall over it - that is, if an autopsy performed by a helpful doctor hadn't given us conclusive evidence that it was a self-termination, but his incessant need to handle every piece of evidence in the room came in handy when he absent-mindedly slid open a morgue tray containing the body of the victim of the previous debraining, which let me at least confirm that the body was in medbay's custody all along. Anyway, SS13 is pretty fun, and doing detective work can be engaging and rewarding.. provided you actually have a case to crack. More often than not, criminals are very overt and it's usually open and shut on who committed a crime. Still, there's those few other cases, and you can impress colleagues by figuring out who took the donuts in the meantime.
Great video like always ! Personally the last good "detective game" that I played was "A Normal Lost Phone", you get a lost phone without credit and wi-fi and you can try to discover why this phone was lost, you have to be a real detective with all the things that you mentioned to make a good detective game, but with only the interface of a Phone and your mind. The only downside of the game is that it is a little bit easy, but very interesting.
This video was brilliant. I have for the last few years been attempting to articulate and organize all of the problems with many detective games and have them addressed exactly as this video has succeeded in doing. Not only have you done so wonderfully, you've introduced examples for each of these points that have handled them well not so much as a perfect solution but a standard to go by. I myself intend to create a detective game I feel will truly allow the player to solve all the puzzles on their own without unnecessary spoonfeeding while simultaneously not giving any puzzles that are too difficult or unreasonable to solve, and I will be referencing this video and the source examples provided here. I cannot thank you enough and I am very happy I saved this video to watch when I did.
In the Game "999" one of many things you can do is that you can find out, how the first person in this game dies, by combinating clues and using mathematics to make an assumption, which will make sense halfway through the game, so you know what's up before it even gets revealed near the very end as a small part of the whole mystery, so you can make some descisions, following your lead or connect the dots to get some answers of questions or scenarios which are a mystery yet. The thing is, this is all optional and not part of any mission or objective, that you have to do! You can finish this game, without understanding what's going on and have it all revealed at the end as a giant mindfuck you propably have to read a wiki afterwards, if you didn't pay attention before. But the fact, that the game gives you enough clues to find it out by yourself and make it your responsibility to give yourself the task of understanding it all is a huge part of the fun in this game for me personally.
I know that L.A. Noire is far from a perfect or even a "good" detective game in its own right, but I think it is a great "detective TV show" game. I love it dearly, for being one of the most fastidious games ever created. I still maintain that the 1947 recreation of Los Angeles in that game is the most detailed digital representation of any city committed to video games so far.
The "Ace Attorney" games have a lot of detective elements, but it's ultimately a lawyer game. Yes, there is a lot of overlap, but there is one key difference: in detective games you have to DEDUCE what hapened. In other words, DEDUCTIVE reasoning. In the "Ace Attorney" games you have to PROVE it hapened. In other words, INDUCTIVE reasoning. So basically, they are different scratches for different itches. But again, there is a lot of overlap, so there is a lot to learn from both approaches. Or even make a system where you have to use both types of reasoning at different times.
Something not touched on in the video is how important it is for the solution to still be easy enough for most players to find out. The eureka moment is the most underwhelming when you aren't even able to get to it. The best way is for games to hint at the solution in ways subtle enough for the player to understand them, but still think they found out the solution all on their own without any hints.
The problem is real detective work doesn't work like it does in the movies and most people don't think like the tv and movie detectives who can make wild guesses about a murder and are right because the script says they are.
Real detectives only talk to the suspects at the station. Making a realistic detective film would get rather dull if every scene takes place in the same room.
It is an exploration game. Well, you kinda need to make a few deductions to get inside the Ash Twin Project (I don't think it's written anywhere that the Ash's tower on Ash itself goes inside the Project), on the surface of Quantum Moon (it literally tells you to take a photo of the quantum object to keep it in place though) and The Eye (combining the three Quantum Laws). It's like 5% of the game. 5% of it are puzzles (learning the Quantum Laws) The other 90% are 1. Go where you can. 2. Find some writings to translate. 3. Follow the instructions to reach more places. 4. Repeat.
Highly detailed research and presentation on game mechanics available for detective works. Especially those that differentiate player understanding vs brute force trial and error. My heartfelt gratitude! Cons of developing commercial detective game: -Too much effort needed. For every correct clue, tens or hundreds of highly detailed red herrings to create. Also contents for story branches for incorrect deductions. -High chance player won't get to experience most of the contents, leading to players undervaluating the game, despite immense amount of work developers put in. -Common weakness of puzzle games: once solved, very little replayability. High content burn rate. However detective games are even more essential in current time. Your understanding of the game world is tested rather than mastery of game mechanic, putting players in focused learning mode. It can cover far wider subjects rather than those tied to game mechanic.
Seriously, thank you for this video. I'm working on a story driven detective game at the moment and this video has given me loads of ideas on how I can make my game much more interesting to play. I do find there's a need to balance the feeling of actually solving the crime with not making it too difficult for the player to figure out - none of us are real detectives after all - but having game play systems in place that allow you to actually "puzzle" through the crimes is going to make my game so much better!
The Witcher games have had some pretty great detective stories that require the player to make some deductions on their own, and can lead to pretty disastrous outcomes if you get some stuff wrong.
I recommend "the unheard" on steam for a good detective game. It bungles the answer part by prompting with questions, but the rest of the game is solid, with a freedom of information provided and non handhold gameplay.
Yes. I love this game. It feels so rewarding to get right, and you really have to work hard and fully understand the situation. I agree the answer part could be better as you could just guess though, but it's fun enough that you don't want to
Well this was well timed... My bike got stolen and the bike lock cut through on a MAIN ROAD in broad daylight. If anyone here is a good detective let me know
Guys in a truck, they stop right next to your bike, cut the lock, put bike in back of truck. Sold the stolen bike that is now hundreds of kilometers away. Even with cameras, nothing will be done.
To solve the problem discussed at 10:55… instead of having a bank of phrases you could have a large word bank of common words, useful words, red herring words, and random words. Maybe 250-500 words large. It would be a like a dictionary that you could make your own phrase bank with to then answer thought puzzles.
Mine was the DS game 9 hours 9 doors 9 person... Everytime you get an ending you get a little piece of the big picture and solving puzzles have more purepose than just obstacle but tells the story of every room you go through... It was so satisfying when I finished that game when I was a kid :)
Man you could have given a small warning for Mystic River lol, I went into that movie expecting a murder mystery crime thriller following the adventure of our two main detectives but instead I came out of it as a bit of a emotional wreck 🥲😭.
But apart from the putting things in chronological order and all the other dumb mimigames, it's basically just Phoenix wright except all the options are narrowed down for you. The game shows you which evidence could be useful, it shows you which statements may have contradictions and little choice as well as having to awkwardly time your trusty bullet shots.
One detective game I really liked was Blade Runner, a 1997 videogame where you play another Blade Runner with a story parallel to Deckard's one in the movie. You had to guess who committed the crimes and who was or wasn't a Replicant. First great idea was that it changed everytime : in your first play, you could be human, this particular kid would be a Replicant and this merchant another one, but your friend would play it and find out they were a Replicant while the merchant was human. So it really was about you guessing things everytime. The story could also evolve in lots of different ways : if you picked up one clue but missed another, one of your colleagues might progress on the case while you were away. You could resolve the story in multiple ways depending on your choices, your guesses ... and the randomization of the setting. It's not entirely a detective game but I really liked the fact that I wasn't meant to guess everything and it could evolve differently, based on what I did or did not figure. There were a lot of tools (scanning photos, interviewing people, finding evidence, analysing them at the lab, presenting them to the suspects, go to some place, forget to go to another) and nothing was forced upon you. It was a very great and perhaps underrated (or forgotten) game.
Yo. Really glad you mentioned the Shivah. Bought that game on a lark a few years back and I still look back on it as one of the most pleasant of surprises ive ever had buying something random on steam
This video is now super outdated! So I've made a new one, looking at games like Return of the Obra Dinn, Paradise Killer, and Shadows of Doubt. Check it out - ua-cam.com/video/I7q363Ic26o/v-deo.html
The Ace Attorney contradiction system is one of my most satisfying mechanics of all time. The entire game shifts when you catch a lie, and it unravels until the point where you're now on top catching others.
Keanu Valen i agree, but getting it wrong should have a bigger punishmeny
@@pelican7235 the struggle is huge for a challenging detective game, the reason they didn't want your punished as harshly because Capcom does not enjoy alienating certain player demographics.
first thing i looked for, Ace Attorney Smashes it
On the other hand, sometimes you make the right conclusion from the get go and the game doesn't like that, so you present the evidence that makes the perfect sense in the end, but just not yet.
@@bboyhoyack Yeah, I agree it is frustrating when you have the answer or maybe present the correct evidence a phase too early but perhaps it can be explained by the actual in-game court system and the characters involved in it. Like Detective Gumshoe and the Judge for example aren't the brightest needles in the haystack so you gotta walk them through your deductions very slowly and almost in a childlike system. Considering you have to convince Gumshoe in some crime scene phases of the game and then the Judge in other parts it makes sense. Not to mention the prosecutors, not wanting to be convinced otherwise, will shut you down immediately unless you can without a doubt prove every little detail wrong about the suspect. So yeah, I agree it's annoying but I, in my opinion, feel like it was executed well within the game's logic and limitations.
The best detective experience is debugging code while programming. You know something is wrong, but not always where the error is or even why there is an error. You have to come up with the right tests to get the clues behind the error. And the clock is ticking because you want to finish the code in time! I don't think there's a game that matches this kind of experience. Her Story is close, but not quite there.
This is a genious comment.
Old school Rainbow Six was about "programming" your squads with operation plans and then "debugging" them in the action phase until you finished the mission... and I guess not having your people die in a mission was akin to compiling without warnings, lol
So Human Resource Machine and 7 Billion Humans are the best detective games?
So a Zachtronic game with a time limit?
Debugging is like being the detective in a crime where you're also the murderer
There is a short detective sidequest in Bioware's star wars rpg "Knights of the old republic" on the planet dantooine where as part of your jedi training you can be asked to help solve a murder involving two potential suspects, a variety of motives, multiple methods of murder, and most crucially, you can get it wrong and it won't reset. Your incorrect deduction is treated as truth if it is reasonable enough and can result in a miscarriage of justice if you get it wrong. This gives the case significant weight despite it ultimately being entirely optional and trivial to the plot of the game. It gives you a real detective feel, especially because you don't have to do it. Whether the case is solved is entirely dependant on the players motivation to solve it and nothing else.
Was scrolling for this comment! A great quest
@@Roaringdragon7 Thanks for your support
Oh, yeah. I remember convincing the jury I was right and winning and feeling sick to my stomach.
I would just screw it up just to see what happens
Probably one of my favourite parts of KOTOR. It's only beaten by these trials on Manaan when you have to defend yourself
"That little girl isn't warm enough for my beard to have happened."
Case solved!
You're right! It all makes sense: the girl was killed AFTER I grew my beard!
Uhhhhh... no.
the perfect story for a young and talented manga artist, isn't it?
@@JosephJoeseph jojoke
@@chabweezy9905 ah, I see you're a man of culture as well
My bf and I played obra dinn a while ago - fantastic detective game. We solved the whole thing after probably around 12 hours of straight gameplay and damn it was SO satisfying figuring out everything basically from scratch. Absolutely no handholding, you really have to piece everything together yourself. Looking forward to similar games in the future!
Try “The Case of the Golden Idol”. It’s very similar to Obra Dinn, but it has a better story.
There is a much larger problem you skimmed across and just overlooked.
Games have no way to punish the player outside of a Game-Over, or a slap on the hand until you get the "correct" answer.
Imagine if in L.A. Noire, putting away the wrong people made suspects less likely to be honest with you, or you'd have to deal with other detectives who are also moving on your crime scenes because they think they can do a better job. Or putting away too many wrong suspects led to some of them getting acquitted, and you get demoted and have to work a few other cases until you can prove you've got your skill back, or those people you put away start harassing you by paying some Guinea motherfuckers to mess with you.
There's just so much room for improvement in games instead of "You chose wrong/Game Over/2 stars/That's not right/Try again."
I like this idea. LA Noire's player rankings/score is probably the worst way detective games go about the issue, in my opinion. If the player is someone who cares about getting a high score, the ideal way isn't to think harder about the game, it's to look up which option to pick in the first case, which does kind of destroy the whole detective aspect of the game.
And then you marry these ideas with the technical and financial constraints that come with developing a game, and you've got an entirely new issue on your hands.
It's no surprise that most of these total sum games fall short to their more tight and focused indie counterparts.
+Beat Yer Meat! Yeah, that's something to be dealt with. It would be nice if a game was directly powered by it's analogically reality without any hardware or financial limitations. Then again................that's something that could be possible at a properly graded scale. Very interesting.
UndeadTurning I think aviary attorney avoids that
Those are all punishments you described, but what exactly does that fix about the player's experience? While those are some imaginative and immersive ideas, they sound more like a punishment for carelessness. Yeah players don't need a brick wall to run into every time they mess up, but idk how making the game harder fixes the problem of the player wanting to feel like they're figuring it out
One major problem is accessibility. The developers are trying to strike a balance between challenge and solvability. Players have to be able to make the connections. If they're too difficult people won't be able to progress and quit playing
Difficulty levels can solve that.
There are a lot of options with hint systems, there's been a lot of experimentation with the format since the early days of adventure game hintbooks.
Well, change the fucking mystery then. It doesn't have to have the same answer every time, right? Also increases replay-value.
yeah but you game that requires x time and x budget to do, now needs 10x that because the game actually have 10 times more content. That is not a viable solution in most of the cases
Erika the problem is that would only work if the cases were built to be randomly generated. That means that evidence would also have to be random and so would dialog exposing contradictions. Writing would be affected because you wouldn't be crafting a mystery, but giving 10 possible murder weapons, 10 perpetrators, 10 generic lies and 10 generic witnesses/evidence that contradict the lies in every case.
Hopefully this comment won't get buried, but a great UA-camr called Mr Wendal made a similar video called "Games That Make You Feel Like Sherlock". Your videos share some similar ground but both make unique points. Cheers Mark.
I don't have much to say, but I just wanted to let you know that someone else (me) found your comment. I'll definitely be checking Wendal's channel out, I haven't seen it before.
did "a google a day" & deja google get a mention?
*SLAM* TWENTY. EIGHT. STAB WOUNDS.
Thanks for this. About to watch it
I remember probably my favorite moment came not from an entire game, but part of it; that being the first Deus Ex game. There's a scene before one of the final maps in the campaign storyline where you rest over at someone's estate before venturing via aircraft to your next destination. There's just enough in the way of clues to figure out that his pilot is an impostor, a fake that plans on killing you and was only recently replaced, though the game plans for you to miss this and reacts accordingly if you do.
However, I caught these clues and with no dialogue path or environmental option to progress this story, killed the man on the spot. It incited outrage in my host, but there was in fact a follow-up conversation that revealed the entire thing. Not only was nothing handed to me in the situation, but I acted on my instincts and was rewarded by the game acknowledging my deductions and rewarding my decision making. Definitely a top-ten gaming moment for me.
3 years ago but, it's a mechanic actually.
I remember I was suspicious so I went back to talk to the estate owner and eventually knocked out the mechanic
**Insert Among Us joke here**
-OMAJGAD, JC, A BOMB!
- A BOMB!!!
@@UCJGcfCpKFcTpkGSHEEKhKwQ
Oh you remind of Assassin's Creed: Revelations, where I was looking around for an ax that I had dropped during a skirmish while a large crowd looked on. Nothing was out of the ordinary until I realized that one guy was programmed with a strange body language.
It caught my attention. And I turned on the intention sensor. It was an assassin armed with a *knife* !
@@AceTechn0 suspicious sir
I'm planning to create a detective mystery solving game. This was EXACTLY what I needed. I was having a hard time thinking of what type of game mechanic that couldn't be brute forced. I want the players to deduce outside the game and this helped me a whole lot. Thanks!
im rooting for you 100% i love these typa games
have you finished the game? Im curious
It must have taken you so much involvement to make this video... but it was totally worth it!! Congrats
This video is a masterpiece. It tackles an interesting and underexplored topic, breaks it down with an intelligent framework (the stages of good detective work in media), provides loads of relevant examples from multiple genres and outside of the usual popular AAA games, and delivers everything smoothly with well-selected clips, high production values, and careful pacing.
The video draws so many interesting connections it feels like the product of good detective work itself!
Thank you this was a really nice comment
I agree entirely. This curatorial approach is so useful especially in a world of so many games. The examination of the best aspects from many games can really inform developers and have an impact on future games. I hope you continue the trend of larger curatorial works like this.
I agree.. all these videos are basically all the things I've been fascinated about with video game design and no one has really tackled in any real depth, or if they did it's hidden in some research paper somewhere. Really appreciate the channel!
When you started showing clips of Mystic River, I paused the video and decided to watch that first. Fantastic film.
My favorite detective/murder mystery game of all time also happens to be my favorite point and click adventure game: The Colonel's Bequest. I loved that it lets you beat the game having no idea what is actually going on, but then gives you small hints at the end that make you realize that replaying it and looking harder to try to understand what actually happened is totally worth it. I also love the fact that it is more focused on people and their relationships to one another instead of just solving little archaic puzzles. Absolutely brilliant game design for the time.
This video pulls on a ridiculous repertoire of detective games. Colour me impressed, I thorougly enjoy good detective stories but have never found detective games compelling.
The evidence often feels unnaturally compelling (handholdy) or I find myself not properly motivated by the story, call me picky. I just want an orient express or small village constable story with a reasonable cast of characters you can interact with and a properly open investigation where the player can be interviewing all the wrong people and looking for clues in all the wrong places.
Have you ever played Return of the Obra Dinn?
Do you remember that on the Orient Express they ALL did it?
So basically a game version of detective frost?
@@massimookissed1023 SPOILERS! Jeez! Some people are so rude.
@@vrish1420 Everyone knows about the Orient Express, but I wish I could have watched it without knowing
Also there is a rule that I use in righting my detective role play campaigns. It is called "The 3 clue rule": for every conclusion that you want the players to reach you have to have at least 3 clues. A lot of detective games don't do that. They just have one path they expect you to follow. And that is less deduction and more guessing game.
and to expand on this rule, If a clue MUST be present to progress a story make it the 4th and let the game help the player. Like a certain person calls you to tell you that s-/he has seen x at y. Or a certain piece of evidence has been found.
Thanks for posting that. This is a great video, but I think it's worth it for video games to look at pen-and-paper RPGs for inspiration and vice versa - this is a conondrum that both face.
It's worth noting that Robin D. Laws is considered one of the greatest RPG designers of the modern times, and his most famous creation, GUMSHOE, was created pretty much exclusively to solve this problem - and the article linked argues, quite effectively in my opinion, that it doesn't.
@@RedwoodRhiadra That was a great read, thank you!
Given my name, hearing "Ethan G." made me jump quite high.
Well, that's a concerning message.
At least your name isn't "John G." There's a whole movie about killing that guy! (Memento; very good movie btw.)
Weird, I have a friend named Ethan G.
11:20
I'd be careful.
@@nitrogamer8222 I think that was the joke lol
I really liked the investigations in Danganronpa and it made me feel awsome when I could solve a murder before starting a trial.
Finally. Someone gets it
If only they didn't provide some critical evidence only after the trial starts. At least it doesn't happen all the time, but still alibis and accounts are often unknown until the trial starts.
*I feel awesome when I could solve a murder berfore starting the trial* *cough* *cough* 11307
The Danganronpa series are some of my favorite detective games, because, although their Investigate! sequences are rather rail-roaded, the class trials allow you to use the clues you have to shoot through the weaknesses in your classmates' arguments. Most of the trials also do a really good job at walking you through the logic of the case, so that you don't figure it all out too early, but instead figure it out moments before the protagonist does (the first game isn't as good at this, as some of the cases are REALLY easy (i.e. 11037 is not hard to figure out for people who use the Latin alphabet regularly), but DR2 and DRV3 have some absolutely brilliant trials).
Trial 5 of DR2 is legitimately brilliant
I think Danganronpa is also good at simulating arguments that tend to heat up (with the various ways the speech sentences move on the screen) and involve whispering (with the White Noise) and somehow cutting through those to make your point heard (which is pretty important considering the protagonists tend to be someone who doesn't stand out). Wrong decisions can cause the participants their lives, after all, so it's natural for some of them to panic or be more aggressive, and I think Danganronpa's argument system excels at selling this point.
The difficulty is dumbed down considerably and almost artificially. Allow players to pick any evidence instead of a set list, remove the question-answer (psyche taxi, logic dive, others asking you questions in-between debates) minigames altogether. They're all trivial anyway.
----- SPOILERS -----
Also, during Danganronpa V3's first murder I immediately thought "The Mastermind is the killer and he just escaped through the secret door". Which is exactly what happened. But nobody (including the allegedly Ultimate Detective) even CONSIDERED this possibility during the first trial. OTOH I like that they do fewer flashbacks and less hand-holding in V3. Some important pieces of evidence may not even appear in the clues list and we only have Shuichi's incredible memory to thank for some solved cases. Of course it should be the player's memory instead.
Great video Mark. I am glad there are other gaming journalists who really enjoy detective games, and hope they are done more often. Maybe we should all band together and make one :P
I'm approximately 3 years too late, but yes, you should! :-D
And I'm 5 months too late. We essentially need the dark souls of decision based detective games.
@@joshuabantum3299 yup I'm in!!
I think the best way to improve detective games is somethings that most game don't do, that is allow you to fail, not only that, not even let you know that you have miss interpreted something. The same way in Xcom or DarkestDungeons you have to roll with the punches, in a mystery scenario the story should develop itself... get closer to the answer and the culprit starts to get nervous, maybe he commits another crime or tries to flee or destroys some evidence... get further from the answer and the culprit tries to make you follow a red herring. And that's just things you can do with the culprit, in a good story you can have other "players", maybe you have a detective rival, or a family member of the victim out on revenge (probably against an unsuspecting innocent).
The key things is that this things should be tied to how well you are doing your investigation. Maybe is time based, some clues get lost (something in the trash-can get thrown with the rest of the garbage), witnesses get cold feet, etc.
Not only do I tend to feel this isn't very fun, I worry about just how elitist it is. There's an increasing sense among better players in gaming to look at the experiences of frustrated, mediocre players, and say "Well, it's *your fault* then, because you did X. The game itself is fine."
I may be different, but I view fun failure scenarios as an equally integral part of good game design. If I get spotted by a guard, changing the stealth situation into a permanently active chase/search eg Batman is a lot more fun than sitting in a closet and waiting for an unbeatable squad to go home, eg Metal Gear Solid. I really feel that the amount of increased enjoyment someone can get by having consequences of failure hammered home are really minimal. And of course, the effects on less competent players are profound. I really worry that the reason that someone wants consequences in games is not so their own experience will be more fun, but so that they can brag about it, and demean players that they feel "are dumbing down gaming by not being able to figure these things out". Given how competitive people are in online multiplayer games, I don't feel my worries are unfounded.
Having unspoken failures also negates the ability for slower learners to correct their behaviors into thinking along the right track. It's pretty typical in an action game for most deaths to be towards the beginning when someone doesn't really "get" how this game works - then, once they've worked it out, they can fight with general competency, but not until then. In a detective game, maybe someone really didn't understand how the game's deduction system works, and makes a lot of bad guesses - the game wouldn't even be helping them along by having the script keep rolling through.
Basically you're saying that games should be dumbed down to the lowest common denominator, because... reasons? Never ever have I heard of the same argument used for books or movies. "This book contains too many words and 2 different languages in it, mediocre readers would be confused!" Games are art and should be treated as such. Not every game has to be appealing and "fun" for everyone.
I like the idea of failure being an option, but I think it should still be able to point out at least some of your mistakes. I think of the old 'Where in the USA is Carmen Sandiego' game I used to have on floppy when I was a kid. If you screwed up by going to too many wrong locations and missing your deadline or by not getting a warrant before catching the criminal, then you failed and the criminal escaped. But the game would let you know when you were in the wrong place or would tell you that you needed to have a warrant to actually arrest them, so you could try to adjust that kind of thing in the future. If you keep failing and the game never finds a way to suggest what you are doing wrong, then you may not be able to figure out what to correct (this is assuming the game is decent enough to have complexities, so the mistake isn't just immediately obvious to anyone without any prompting).
What if the detective game had a system akin to the Bombers' Notebook from Majora's Mask? Except that gets filled automatically as you play. A Notebook that doesn't as much give you clues what to do, but rather keep track of what events happened when. It would only update with stuff you actually experience in that session, allowing you to backtrack down your current timeline and figure out why something ended up the way it ended up. Possibly keeping track of past branches too. As is, it would be too crude to work, but it might be a concept that can be adopted and further developed made to work for detectives.
Extra Credits talked about the "basic literacy" effect. If you can read decently, you can read War and Peace. You may not understand a lot of it and it may take a while, but you can at least read it. However, no book or movie is going to shut off and refuse to let you continue because you're not "literate enough" in its medium. Moreover, it's impossible to waste an entire afternoon reading the wrong direction in a book. Both of these are things that just make the experience worse for lots of people, and don't even improve the experience for those not getting tripped up.
I'm seeing a lot of this throwaway argument that "not all games have to be fun for everyone". It's about as logical as getting a request from a colorblind user to allow for options to be changed, and replying "Screw you, not all games have to be fun for everyone." People are more intelligent than you give them credit for, but some people simply learn more slowly, and it's always worthwhile to analyze that mental approach, and give it space. If you couldn't make a game that is enjoyable to both master detectives and gaming amateurs, I would say it's either because you're not being a creative enough game designer, or because the master player feeds off of the bad experiences of others.
These are things I've thought of myself, and the real issue is that you basically have to give the player a "soft conclusion" almost like a soft failure state. Because the only way you can be certain is based on the evidence, not the game prompting you with congratulations. If you have a "hard conclusion" for the case, then that means the player has to be in the exact same headspace as the designer, which often goes wrong. There's multiple times during the ace attorney series where I understand how the case went, but don't understand which piece of evidence they want when there's multiple pointing towards the same thing. If multiply the possible factors you should be juggling in a real detective game, it would easily be 50 times more than in an ace attorney game, and trying to be as specific would be aggravating.
There's tools I've thought about that I found interesting, which is a virtual evidence board. Instead of the game checking whether you're right, you're checking whether evidence matches, so you've got the crime itself, a murder, tied to a murder weapon, and the murder can be given a hypothetical summary, like 'a crime of passion' which can check against the people you've questioned, giving them profiles, summarizing who they are, what they do, possible motive, personality - if you feel how emotional or impulsive someone is, fits the description of the crime. The notes you write yourself.
And every topic of discussion and piece of evidence can be discussed with everyone, as opposed to 4 multiple context choices, and every comment is added as a note to the topic for later review, automatically giving plenty of information to juggle, and notes to compare like in contradiction.
Although L.A. Noire is not perfect I really liked how you can solve the case in multiple ways in case you do something wrong or miss something. It also gives a great feeling, because a real detective wouldn't give up or try again over and over after a witness stops talking to you or something. Of course this can be used to go the "easy" route, but I think an important part of a detective game is the aspiration to solve it your own way.
This is why I like Her Story. There's little to no external feedback, and the game more or less doesn't even care if you even understood what you spent 4 or 5 hours hunting for clues about. Yet its one of the most engaging experiences I've ever seen in a game because its all player controlled. I choose my investment and all the information is in my head. I have to make every decision and at every decision the game's only feedback is more cryptic clues for me to decipher.
Yes the one thing i did not like in this video is avoiding brute forcing a puzzle. Games cost a ton of money to make and trying to have so many answers is very costly Imagine how much longer La noire would of taken with all the voice lines they would of needed to record. It's just not cost effective.
but other then that "brute forcing" puzzles happens in real life not everyone gets the right answer on the 1st try.
Sky Cap You don't really need to have a different voice line for every possible incorrect solution, a simple "I don't think that'd hold up in court" would do for all incorrect final solutions without giving away if you have the wrong guy or just lacked evidence.
In real life, detectives really want to avoid getting the case incorrect because it could ruin their reputation or get them fired if they screw up enough. That isn't a real worry when you're playing a video game because it'd be dumb to lock you out of the game and restarting part of or the entire case would be pointless since you'd already know what to do unless they have a new case randomly generated (which would be even more work than having all those failure dialogs you mentioned).
I like this plan, but it runs the risk of flooding the player with information and making them feel overwhelmed. There are a couple solutions to that, from keeping the maximum number of variables relatively low to allowing players to kind of... "favourite" for lack of a better term, specific notes or pieces of evidence they think are important so that they can easily be re-accessed later.
Something we also have to remember is dev time, it's already really hard just to write a good mystery with no plotholes, but writing a good mystery that can be solved in multiple similar ways without having any accidental red herrings or pieces that actually fit but aren't accounted for is a mind-bending task. If one were to attempt this, one would probably have to re-imagine how we organize all the different elements that go into a game. Ambitious, but not impossible.
Ok going into this video I was like, "He's not going to mention Hotel Dusk/Last Window" but then you use the music at 01:40 and I got chills. No one appreciates these games as they should.
L0LhahaDEAD yes! Such great games... I was also a big fan of the Another Code series. It's so sad that the developer had to shut down...
Cing was bought by Arc System Works and under their name they released another game on 3DS called Chase: Cold Case Investigations - Distant Memories.
It's really short, but kind of like seeing an old friend again.
I loved those games. While not technically "the best" detective games out there, everything surrounding the game (character design, music, overall look and feel, etc) made it two of my favorite games on the DS.
Well i would... If i was more interested in them
That remind me when I accused a NPC of being a murderer in The Witcher 1.
My suspect, a fence, told me conflicting stories and suspicious lies thus I accused him and move on with my game.
Thing got very awkward later when I discoverd that he was in fact part of the Royal Secret Police and that was the reasons for his lies.
I dicovered I was wrong but I had good reason to be. Good stuff for a investigation in a RPG .
Yep, this was a lovely section
12:28 I'm so glad Her Story was mentioned. The entire time before that I kept thinking it did a lot of these things right.
People ,if you want the concept of murdered soul suspect but done good then play ghost trick phantom detective
This. So much this.
Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective is a fantastic game. It's one of my favorites. But despite it's name, it is NOT a detective game. It's a fun puzzle game, with a fantastic story and characters, and I absolutely recommend it, but it is not a detective game.
Ghost Trick is a puzzle game, not a detective one. However, if you just want a great story and Rube Goldberg machine-style puzzles, it is a must play.
I didn't feel it challenging, to test my deduction skills, but I really like it
Jorge Barquero i never called it a detective game or challenging i just said that it executed the concept good
Has anyone else played *Why Am I Dead At Sea* ?
It's a cool game where you play as a ghost on a ship that was recently murdered, and you have to figure out how you were killed by possessing the other passengers on the ship. It's super low budget, but still has pretty solid writing and design.
The thing that's most relevant to this video though, is that you spend most of the game just gathering evidence without having to make any big deductions and then at the end it's up to you to put the evidence together correctly. The game has multiple endings, so if you fail to put the evidence together properly you'll end up with only half the mystery solved and a "I guess we'll never know" for the rest of it. I had to replay the final scene a couple of times before I got the true ending because it actually expects you to use your intelligence to some extent. Worth checking out imo.
Earth Earth Oh wow, I'm actually on a hunt for some good "ghost" games but don't know where to start or go. So thank you!
Aww man, I wish he had mentioned the Nancy Drew point-and-click games! Those were hard! You really had to look for evidence- it felt so rewarding when you finally got a lead to follow.
Agreed!
I remember getting stuck in one game because I hadn't gone through a piece of evidence correctly. That was brutal.
I've only played a few, but I do like how they games focus on puzzles, but some of the best clues, I don't recall being brought attention too, so you can miss them if you aren't paying attention.
Kid me was fucking stuck on those games, while my mom, who was a mystery nut was just standing in the corner facepalming like🤦🏽♂️ 😂, i was stubborn but i just couldnt finish em.
Surprised that you didn't include - Sherlock Holmes: The Silver Earring. That was the one game which made me play with pen and paper ready. It forced you to make your own deductions; you had to answer the question of 'whodunnit' at the end; picking from all the people you've interacted with.
Hence I think what makes a good detective game is this: The game progresses as events unfold and new evidence is collected. But there are no deduction mini-games between chapters which hold your hand throughout. You make your own deductions, note them down and come up with the truth at the very end.
I second this, still my favourite SH game to date. I paced through my flat for half an hour straight for the conclusion, good times.
My favourite is SH crimes and punishment. That game actually allowed you to be a detective and had least amount of mindless puzzles. In crimes and punishments you can actually be wrong and accuse wrong suspect and end the case. Player freedom and no hand holding is something we rarely see in games nowdays. Especially a detective game should never hold your hand or have a linear structure. Imo a linear structure totally misses the point of solving the case. It becomes more like following the case.
yes!! gonna check it out, it's right up my alley on detective games. thanks for the rec!!
The Silver Earring definitely has one of the best deductive gameplay in a detective game in a long time...you're given a quiz at the end of each section and you need to not only answer either yes or no, you also need to find the evidence or testimony that proves your point, which definitely made guesswork very difficult. It still has the problems Mark mentioned in which you're still prompted by the text of the question and there are still the usual point-and-click issues of pixel hunting and certain puzzles with solutions that don't really make sense.
However, the game does make up for it with the optional bonus quiz at the very end in which the game challenges you to use all the answers, evidence, and deductions you've made to try and solve the whole thing. And the best part is, the game never tells you outright if you're right or wrong by taking that quiz. It simply goes on and you see the final cutscene giving the entire answer...if you got it right in the quiz, you'll feel pretty smart. But you're not punished for getting it wrong.
Ah, the gold old times when frogware did good Sherlock games! Sherlock vs Jack the Ripper was great too, although not a good detective game per se
I’ve just started playing Disco Elysium and so far it seems really good. You’re not guided too much and where you get a list of “goals” noted down much of them are optional and some possibly bad for you. For example (Go buy a bottle of booze). So you have goals written down but you have to choose as a player which ones you will achieve. Also, your character has different traits and skills. There are three pre-made options or you can roll your own like in DnD.
With each char they know different things or have different abilities so the way you can solve things changes.
Crucially, Disco Elysium also lets you fail checks. You can fuck up certain leads and things if you're unlucky or tackle them at a bad time, but because you know there are multiple possible clues, it always feels like its in your hands. Love that game
Eh. I love Disco to death, but it's not really a detective game at its core. The investigation is almost more like a backdrop to the game.
There's one key aspect of investigative work which is quite evident in the clips from Mystic River (and a number of other films, Zodiac being a prime example) and which is not mentioned in the video.
It's in the first clip you show: Fishburne asks Bacon a why the victim swerved without hitting the brakes, Bacon answers. The two detectives are working together to come to a conclusion. When one makes a hypothesis, the other one tests it.
It's quite strange to me why this is not used in games. Especially in something like L.A. Noire, which goes to great lengths to provide you with partners. These partners proceed to contribute exactly nothing worthwhile to your investigations.
The main issue detective games have is feedback - you think you're on to something but you have no way of testing it. Wouldn't it be more satisfying if in L.A. Noire you could first present your hypotheses to your partners? You'd still have to get the confession out of the suspect, but you would run the evidence by your partner who might dismiss it, confirm it, or even lead you to another clue.
You'd at least know whether your idea of how the crime happened was feasible.
Since the feedback would remove a lot of the "WTF am I supposed to be doing?" frustration, it would allow you to have more clues and therefore more variables. The cases could be harder, because you'd no longer be required to figure it out while completely in the dark as to whether you're on the right track - which isn't to say that you couldn't.
Of course, it wouldn't have to be limited to testing your theories, it could be brainstorming and arriving to a conclusion just like in the scene from Mystic River. A dialogue tree, except one where you're not prying information from someone, but rather trying to figure something out, with the partner possibly providing more clues, or at least more ideas.
Could you brute-force it like that? Sure, I guess, but it would be more realistic (and movie-like) than brute-forcing it by loading a save or looking up an FAQ.
But games are mostly adolescent wish-fulfillment, so a game where you play as that one uber-detective who figures it all out by himself, 'cos he's the man, is probably more marketable.
This is great, although the biggest problem would be how to present the partner as having good ideas and logic, but not having them outright Sherlock-school you by having already figured it out and patiently waiting for you to catch up.
An interesting idea I had for the mechanic for the accusation part: the game could have a "reconstruction mode", sort of like a director mode, in which you get to play as all the actors involved in the protagonist's head, similar as to how tv detectives are often depicting as imagining the crime happening while examining the crime scene. You have to move around all the characters in a timeline effectively reconstructing the events before you can make the proper accusation. You also get to choose what actors are in the scene, as well as what they were doing.
Maybe this mode could be used midgame to spot missing pieces of the puzzle, prompting the progress on the story. Progressively you "unlock" more actors that can appear in that scene, and eventually evolve your reconstruction from a simple conjecture that invites you to dig deeper in a certain direction, to a more complex scene that you can use as your accusation.
you're a fucking genius. holy shit. it would be damn difficult to actually pull off in a game, but oh man would it be amazing
@@axelpetersson5787 Reminds me a bit of the Memory Remix mechanic in Remember Me (although with a different objective) - I'd happily play a whole game of that.
I think this would be great in a VR game! Rather than having a limited number of options of things to interact with, etc. you can incorporate actual physics, make everything touchable and there would be no special controls to have to design or button prompts because--it's VR! Pick something up, throw it, stab somebody, it's all there
I think LA Noire was really a missed opportunity in a lot of ways. They put in all the work to make a big open world game and then gave no incentive to explore it instead of just fast travelling. The moment someone mentions something, it's added to your map and you can just appear there. I think it would have felt better if you actually had to figure out whew locations were and then go find them yourself, and for the game to not just scribble every significant piece of information down in a nice filtered list. It feels less like you're leading the investigation and more like you're just being given a quick quiz to make sure you were paying some attention.
In the same way, I think it would be good if games didn't reveal information in a linear way. A lot of the detective games I've played follow a system of putting you in a place with evidence and not letting you proceed with the game at all until you've found it. Then when you do find it, you move on to one specific other place and repeat. The game is implicitly telling you that there is more evidence in this spot and then that you've got it all, which is not information available to the character.
In LA Noire, it's also the case that all the evidence is important so you aren't collecting anything that's redundant or a red herring. There are few irrelevant items at the scene, the ones that are there tend to repeat in many locations (cigarette boxes and bottles) and Cole pretty much immediately says "this isn't important" when you pick it up. Again, this is the gameplay system providing you with more information than you should have. When you pick up something and Cole doesn't poo poo it, you know you'll need to twist and turn it to find something out about it. It would be great if the game let you collect loads of useless evidence and let you figure out which ones are important yourself, or if there was evidence that might he useful but not necessary if you work out the problem some other way, rather than working it out the exact one way that the developer thought of.
In my inexperienced opinion, this kind of stuff shouldn't be too difficult to improve. I think the main reason they don't is because they don't want players to get stuck because it is true that the more complicated you make a game, the fewer the people will be able to actually finish it. But even then it could be offset by a mechanic like a partner pointing out clues or making speculations with varying degrees of specificity depending on the difficulty. Like on the highest difficulty you get no direct help and on the lowest difficulty they figure out most of the stuff and let you just do the kind of selection games you see in a lot of the standard detective games.
ig a game with a lot of travelling is mafia ii, which kinda feels like more driving than story
Believe it or not, many people don't finish complicated games and they bad mouth it to others. You can be a hard-core detective wanna be but the majority of game players just want to get a taste and feel the experience. It doesn't have to be 100% realistic. It's the rush that makes people purchase these games, not overly realistic setup and game mechanics. If you want to sell a lot of games, you have to lower the barriers not raise them.
@@bluerabbit1236 Completely agree, which is perhaps why the detective genre (the most mental of all genres) struggles to adjust to the gaming medium, because simply put, people prefer witnessing intelligence through the character rather than utilising their own. This is a tragedy because ultimately the appeal of detective games is illustrating how logical processes can make sense of chaotic worlds, which is far more rewarding when it is actually earned. Players going for jazz music, trenchcoats and murder mysteries set themselves up to be disappointed because they either expect the character to solve it for them or for the puzzle to be easier.
This video got me thinking about a Text Adventure I played a while back called ''Make it Good' by Jon Ingold. It's a typical detective game in that you interview witnesses and gather clues, but if you just blindly go about solving puzzles and trying to progress in the game without paying attention to the story, you will miss the fact there are subtle hints throughout saying that the story is not what you think. You can progress all the way to an end without the game telling you that you've screwed up, as would happen in real life, but you have to pay attention and make different not-so-obvious actions to complete your actual objective to get the best ending for your character
Your channel is all over my subscription feed and I love it
checkmark up whats
@@nathanzotov1160 nuttin
Funnily enough, the best "Eureka!" moment I've ever had in a game was in Persona 4.
It's a JRPG/Life sim with a murder-mystery plot, and because you don't constantly focus on the latter I think it actually makes for the best implementation of a murder mystery. Movies like Mystic River or Seven or anything like that usually feel like one continuous search for the answer, but really they just cut out the down time. That's fine in a movie because A) they need the wrap it up in 2 hours or less and B) the audience doesn't have to solve the mystery.
Whenever you have to do some heavy-duty problem solving in real life, it's beneficial to not ram your head against a wall when you're stuck; it's better to take your mind off of it for a bit and come back to it fresh. This gives your brain time to process all the information and make some subconscious connections. That's what the Eureka moment is, and it's really difficult to have it when you actively engaged in it.
Because Persona 4 has so much more emphasis on your daily routine and solving more immediate problems (which all factor into the mystery, that's an important part), you have time to let you thoughts develop and when some very spoiler-y decisions come up late in the game, you not only have the info you need you've also had the time to actually understand your circumstances. I've had moments in L.A. Noire where I probably did have all the info I needed, but because there was little down time between the finding the clues and finding the culprit, I wasn't deep enough in the case to really be satisfied with it. Persona 4 lays out most of the clues early on, then asks you like 70 hours later to solve the case. I wasn't 100% sure up until the end, but once the plot came into focus again it all clicked. It's a crazy sensation, and that's what mystery and detective games should strive for in my opinion.
I'm not really sure if its a GOOD detective example, but the quest "One for My Baby" in Fallout New Vegas is one of my favourite detective-like things in any game. Sure its rather short, but the first time I did it I was quite engaged in solving the murder.
I just completed that mission for the first time, and I gotta say, I was kinda expecting it. Although, it was a pretty good quest
the game basically handholds you for the solution.
There's also just one way to solve the quest in the first place, even if it does give you the option to mark at least 6 other NPCs in town.
That's the quest Obsidian used to pitch the concept of New Vegas to Bethesda. That tells you something about it.
I think Orwell deserves a mention as its one of the most engaging deduction based games there is, just like a real detective you spend your time piecing together clues and fragments of information. Your brain really starts to frantically connect dots that might not even be there, its truly amazing, just thought it would be worth a mention.
Contradiction is SO GOOD! FMV is really a wonderful way to explore mystery and horror. You can really get attached to the characters if the acting & writing is good and can also use an actor’s performance as a way to detect lies. Such a fun space to play in.
Just recently started playing "Shadows of Doubt" and I'm genuinely surprised on how many levels its hits on what makes a good detective game, particularly how it overcomes the unique challenge of replayability. The process requires that you take notes, either through the in-game mechanic or with whatever you have on by.
From what I can tell, because of the many features that go into detective mechanics, it's most likely going to be the case that these games will be low-resolution indie products with detailed mechanics and not expansive open-world action RPGs. At least for a while that is. Personally, I prefer small well- detailed products rather than large open-world empties. There are several things this game hits on:
The use of tools and different methods to collect evidence. Also, lots of interactivity.
Any angle you approach it at can work so long as you are finding the evidence and matching up the clues. Plus I enjoy how they approached the whole tutorial process of narrowing the paths at the beginning to then widening further as you get a more proper understanding of the mechanics. (Observation: For more developed detective game mechanics, the more learning the player is going to have to do, which is a fair trade-off for the player, it should be the most mental of all the genres).
There is no player and game mistranslation, if you have a hunch that it may potentially be said person, you are within your right to break into their house, collect some evidence, confront them and so on, you aren't forced to any procedural path.
The only downfalls are the dialogue system which still serves as a function within the game but isn't as merely refined as other games which made that mechanic a lot more of their focus. This by default encourages the player to stop asking for an answer and instead find it through other means (realistic vs unrealistic? up to you).
Came here to say this
Her Story was such an experience. I sat down with my girlfriend and we grabbed a pile of papers and wrote down timelines, ideas, possible searchwords and so on. I just love games that are be able to make you actually DO things in the real world to progress in the game itself.
AND THE WINNER IS
RETURN OF THE OBRA DINN for Best Detective Game
I had to scroll really far to see Obra Dinn mentioned.
Surprised as hell.
Yes he made a video about that
Just what I was thinking
I haven't finished it yet and it is VERY VERY HARD , I have seen all of them die but I have just determined 9 fates .
I was mind blown when I first started playing it, but man I'm not suited for detective games... It's too hard for me! :P
I agree with a lot of your criticisms of L.A. Noire, but I really feel like you ignored one of its best features, which are interrogations. You really have to be paying attention to the story to know whether their statement is a Truth, Doubt, or Lie. (Obviously the facial expressions at the beginning of the game give some of these away, but that's just to teach you how to play.) You can really get penalized for choosing the wrong response, including missing some helpful
or valuable evidence, which can ultimately alter your total understanding of the case. The options to choose from, in my opinion, are lengthly enough to deter mere guess and check gameplay. It's probably the best part of the game, and I think it's worth mentioning.
1+
After finishing watching the video i feel like he underestimated or ignored a lot of things in L.a noire which is kinda shame because I think L.a noire is the closest thing we can get.
As I recalled if you gather enough evidence you could just called lies on everyone, and if they have something to do with the case, they would almost everytime say "I hoped you have evidence to prove that". If they dont say anything related to the case, you can take back the accusation with no regrets.
The best part of the game however was when you are investigating the case for the fire department of the Elysian Fields.
LA Noire notoriously changed the choices from coax, force, and lie to truth, doubt, lie. This lead to a lot of confusion when playing. With the possibility to end the case by accusing the wrong person, that was a bit rough and frustrating. The recent Sherlock Holmes games also let you make the wrong decisions and proceed, but you can back up and choose a different option later. I liked the interogation in LA Noire in theory, but not how it ended up there. Maybe if you could come at things from more angles or try again somehow.
Can't really read those 2011 faces....
@@IBRHEEMGT9600 LA noire is garbage, the story jumps around, just teleports you mid cases. Doesnt let you solve cases, nor go back to look up at certain evidences becaused you talked to the person and they confesed or whatver, the plot needs to go foward. What is it good to have top acting, if you cant play the game because the plot goes foward or whatever. I dont mind to accuse the wrong person. But i will never forgive the game for not letting me go back to look at stuff like a real detective and just jump story to a new point, where you asking yourself wtf...
This is the first time I've seen Discworld Noir mentioned anywhere other than a let's play. It's one of my favourite games and I really wish there were more games like it!
Thank you for this video. We used the idea of writing the clues for our latest game, Void Mine. The dynamic of the game is that you have to read crew journals spread across a space station to deduce the access password to the next level and type it into a console. All this while something is chasing you.
For *"Picking up clues/lead"* , a lot of hacking games do that.
There was a little adventure game on Android called *Hack Run* that had pick up clues through downloading documents and using your command console to search further.
I believe it's also use in the recent Orwell as well.
Not a detective game but I always liked that in the beginning of Metal Gear Solid 2 you had to take the pictures yourselves to gather evidence on the MG's existence. It's more of a private investigator thing as it's basically spying, but I think it's interesting to dissociate the more lawful kind of detectives who are most likely cops, and the ones that are more in the "means to an end" camp, which allows more freedom in term of gameplay possibilities.
A good exemple of this kind of "gathering evidence" situations in a game is the Pictobox subquest in Zelda Wind Waker where you have to secretly take a picture of a dude at the exact moment he put a letter in a mailbox. I'm sure pictures evidence has been used in a lot of detectives games but I think it's interesting to look at "detective mechanics" that are used in/come from other genres. Like Morrowind and its keywords system used to talk with NPCs, which is pretty similar to the search entries that you can use in Her Story while actually interacting with characters.
A lot of games that put isolation in a dangerous place at the core of them tend to have some kind of "immersive investigation", games like Metroid Prime, Resident Evil, Dark Souls, or most Immersive sims. These games tend to put you in a place where things went really bad which is the reason of your isolation in the game. They are not really "mystery games" since to unveil the causes of what went wrong is not really the point, but they all have this idea that something bad happened a long time ago, and if you're curious enough you can explore, read or listen to stuff and if you link the pieces together you will get the bigger picture, thus giving you more context for the things that you do in the game (escaping a place full of zombies for RE1, wandering on a desert planets full of mysterious ruins for Metroid Prime...). You could imagine a story where you need to investigate the old murder of a guy that lived in the Ancient Greece or something, but that stuff happened a long time ago so you need to learn more about the history of the victim with the rest of the world etc, but you need to do that while all the key characters are dead and buried. Well, that's just a random idea but you see the point, that's basically how these games investigations work.
However these kind of detective work tend to obviously lack the element of questionning witnesses, as the whole point is that stuff went bad so long ago that there is no one to interrogate anymore. This is why one could just simply call that "exploration" or "environmental storytelling" in a game, but I still think the parallel is interesting to think about.
Mystery/Detective movies are interesting to rewatch because you can see situations from a different angle with the whole story in mind, but a detective game is not only about watching the story, you also need to play it. But then it makes you wonder : as detective games are basically big puzzle games, how do you make them replayable once you already know the answers? I can replay something like Uncharted because even though I already played it, it feels fresh to just shoot bad dudes. A detective game though is entirely built around the notion that you are looking for something/someone or that you are trying to get an information. The whole juice of the game resides in answering questions ("how do I get that info out of him?" "What object did he use?" "Why did he do that?" and so on) through interaction, but once the answers are already in your mind the interaction can become kind of meaningless. To continue with the action games comparison, the moment where you find an answer in a mystery game is like the moment where you hit an enemy in an action game, however in that case you can watch the attack animation of your character, followed by the hit animation of the enemy, all of that enhanced by visual and sound effect, over and over again because its appeal comes from a purely sensory experience.
The satisfaction that you get from discovering something can only be felt once though.
Well, that didn't stop me from playing the Ace Attorney games a couple of times each but still :p
As for replayability, resourceful developers could make detective/mystery arcs into a larger open-world game rather than building a single game around the core plot/genre. Like in Morrowind, your character is not hard-chained to some imperial law enforcer identity and you may approach the case however you want. The outcomes could vary due to different skill levels, perks or abilities as well. Discovering combinations of in-game elements that lead to unique dialogues and plot twists is one attraction in open-world games. Besides that, there are many other things to do, like the action play you mentioned, or being a master thief (which could somehow blend with detective arcs if the developers so wish).
That said, a game focusing on mystery/detective aspects probably won't ever excel a blockbuster open-world game in replayability. Yep. Some games are meant to be like this, and that doesn't make them worse.
I feel like a game where after collecting clues, the world opens up to whatever area you are in (a huge city with hundreds of residents and conversations) however, only a few are needed to solve the case. You can question anyone, but again.. not everyone will know anything. You analyse clues and track suspects down to their house (perhaps through some kind of database search or something) and so on, with a dedicated notepad to write all your ideas. Not only should this (in my opinion) provide a satisfying true detective experience, it would also be great for people who want to be fully immersed. If the game sticks to the same location but with different cases it shouldn’t be too large of a file. Then again, I know nothing about programming and I could be making a laughing stock of myself but. If it is possible, I’d love to see it happen
Sixteen Suggestions/Observations people made about what makes a Good Detective Game:
1. The best detective game experience is about figuring out the solution to the case by oneself and having the freedom to do so, without the frustration of not being able to communicate that to the game.
2. There are no contemporary game mechanisms to portray hard physical evidence-based deduction. To improve the accusation and proof aspect, the player should go on a full reenactment of what they think the perpetrator did, unlocking more resources and guides during the investigation.
3. Most detective games make the player inhabit a character with distinct thought patterns and reasoning skills, rather than relying on the player's own logic. The audience often appreciates being a witness to a character's intelligence rather than trying to use their own.
4. It is important for the solution to be easy enough for most players to find out, and games should hint at the solution in subtle ways. Too many options can lead to frustration and players resorting to looking up the answer online, so a good detective game should balance guiding the player towards the solution and letting them find it themselves.
5. Good detective games should be open-world and not linear, with the player driving to the scene, searching for clues, talking to people, and connecting the dots on their own without hand-holding.
6. The interactivity of a detective game is an important feature, and limiting it makes the game less immersive.
7. A good detective game should allow the player to solve the case through observation, with the player finding things, hearing character thoughts, building theories, and seeing them either confirmed or denied before moving on to the next mystery. The whole story is only revealed at the end of the mystery.
8. A good detective game should progress as new evidence is collected, without deduction mini-games between chapters holding the player's hand. The player should make their own deductions, note them down, and come up with the truth at the end.
9, A suggestion to include a detective partner in the game who can aid in deduction and provide hints, as seen in the movie Mystic River. The partner could also help to break up any boredom or loneliness that may be present in detective games.
10. A suggestion is to include a "reconstruction mode" where the player can play as all the actors involved in the crime scene to reconstruct the events and make a proper accusation. This mode can be used to spot missing pieces of the puzzle and unlock more actors that can appear in the scene.
11. The player should be able to play past their mistakes to a certain point, where accusing the wrong person has consequences that affect future investigations. The flaw with many games is that the game doesn't allow the story to continue if the deduction is not correct, which often means forcing one singular answer to the problem.
12. Players should be rewarded for being the detective character and presented with fascinating, bold, surprising, emotional, hysterical, and deranged choices. The game should not force players to solve puzzles, and repetitive gameplay over multiple cases but rather let the player role-play one murder for 50 hours.
13. In a detective game, giving the player a "hard conclusion" can be problematic because the player has to be in the exact same headspace as the designer. A virtual evidence board and the ability to discuss every topic of discussion and piece of evidence with everyone can be useful.
14. The game should be tied to how well the player is doing their investigation, and time-based elements such as lost clues or uncooperative witnesses could be included.
15. One limitation pointed out is that detective mechanics are often limited to one method of gathering evidence, rather than utilising multiple methods and strategies to ascertain the nature of the crime.
16. A challenge with detective games is replayability once the answers have been found, as the interaction can become meaningless once the player knows the answers. The satisfaction of discovering something can only be felt once.
Ace Attorney has always been a favorite for me, but the game that really hyped me up alot while playing it was Obra Dinn. Unfolding clues and little by little identifying the crew members was a great experience.
I think that the main problem with detective video games is that a real detective is supposed to have enough experience and knowledge and to be really clever, and obviously most of the players aren't real detectives, so they don't have this skills and the game has to make and abstraction and solve most of the mistery for you.
It's like how in games like Max Payne or RDR there is a bullet time to make and abstraction because their characters have really good aiming skills, but the player doesn't.
The problem is that in Detective games when they solve you the mystery theyr ruin most of the interesting things of the game while in shooters with bullet time it's just another gimmick.
You make a good point. But to be honest, all games have a focus and a target audience, maybe broad, maybe not. A good detective game, one which the player *needs* to be smart, will fit with a indie developer and a small audience. A Sherlock Holmes from a big publisher will need to make compromises.
*slam* TWENTY. EIGHT. STAB WOUNDS.
The Laura Bow games are magnificent detective experiences. In Colonels Bequest, spying on conversations can lead to finding out where to be at what time to listen in on suspects conversations. Lots of deduction and even out of game note taking gave me that rush of truly figuring things out on my own.
What about 'Aviary Attorney'? I think it's a good example of a detective game. Not sure about matching to all mentioned criterias, but still.
Yes I quite enjoyed the game
That Hotel Dusk: Room 215 music... the memories
An open world detective game would work well, where you have to choose what to do, where to go, who to talk to.
I love hearing you gush about Her Story. It's one of my all time favorite games and I really hope you find games inspired by it to recommend in the future.
The ending music from Hotel Dusk just took me back, oh man. Love that game.
I have more of an affinity for film rather than games, but both have played important roles in my life, and I cannot imagine that becoming any less truthful. To get to my point, I would just like to state how informative I find your series, and of course, that you've successfully presented it all in an entertaining way. I recommend you to everyone I possibly can! Thank you for what you do and never compromising quality!
A system for finding the pieces is easy. A system for putting the pieces together is what's hard.
Even most of the systems for the latter process you showed were multiple choice. I don't think that's optimal, because even when you increase the number of choices, you still run the risk of giving away the answer.
What might work better is a system for "reconstructing the crime scene." I.e. you can move the suspects, victims, objects and other factors around the crime scene freely, like an RTS or board game, to storyboard a scenario that doesn't contradict the evidence you've found.
Finding the balance between too complicated and not complicated enough would be tricky, but I think the answer lies somewhere in this direction.
Nancy drew's a pretty good detective/puzzle game series.
I once again know why I support you! Great Video!
I’m a little surprised you didn’t bring up the Nancy drew computer games which use interviews, puzzles and exploration to create interesting gameplay while also using advantage of a clock system that means certain things are only available at certain times and also things like a snowstorm which will only end when you’ve successfully completed an objective and allow you to gain new areas and new information.
Her Story and Outer Wilds are by far the two best detective games I've ever played.
Interesting points. I got some ideas for a good detective game right now, but I know close to naught about game development. I wonder if I could share my ideas with someone who can realize them.
So here goes nothing:
1- the player has a time limit to solve the case to be more realistic (before the date of the court hearing 4 example) and if they don't finish the case, the case is left unsolved, they lose some reputation as a detective and they take on another case (bigger cases would require a higher detective reputation/connections with police or govt officials)
2-the player would have to jot down clues they think are relevant on a piece of paper (or in-game to the notebook by adding which clues they think are important). That way it's much more intentional. Many clues are red herrings, and you don't have to use the exact same set of clues to solve the case (making everyone's experience feel unique to them).
3- by the end of the time limit (e.g. during the court hearing or the detective revealing show) the player would have to type in not just the culprit, but how, where, and when the murder was done.
4- the player can make mistakes and, depending on their current reputation and deduction, the police might believe their conclusion and arrest the wrong suspect. But it can later be revealed that the deduction was wrong. Make enough wrong deductions, and you can lose your reputation and even your license which could end the game (i.e. multiple endings) This gives the game a realistic feel and adds weight to your choices as a detective.
I have more ideas I'd like to share with anyone interested.
Thank you! Not only is this a great video it inspired me to try and make my own point-and-click detective style game with no hand holding.
I had to laugh at the Wolf Among Us bit; you can make some really bizarre conclusions there if you want. I think in a lot of ways there Wolf isn't really challenging the player to really investigate the murder, at least not in the way of lot of the other more straight "detective" games do; it gives you the mystery and some clues, but this is still something the game doesn't really want to force you to study. It's prodding the player to see the connection and claim responsibility for it, but the other options may as well be extended jokes.
There's the one option in both bits there to actually refer to the evidence you've found, and two options to make obvious wild or shallow guesses that don't seem to have any relevance even if true. There's no reason any player genuinely trying to give an appropriate answer would pick "Murder makes him hungry"; but the option still exists so the answer isn't just "given", even if it may as well be, and so the player isn't disconnected from Bigby and put in a backseat role.
The major problem for that game was that ultimately the murder case is almost irrelevant for the story, it was more important that you didnt piss enough people off while investigating.
To be fair, that's essentially what the comics are like. Bigby solves the mystery in the very first issue and only elongates the time to flirt with the girl he likes.
Phoenix Wright has a lot of this too. To this day one of my favorite dialogue options in any game I've played is accusing a woman of eating a bone because the plate she claimed to have eating a T-bone steak off of didn't have one on it.
@@allentor2876 I also really like claiming Marvin Grossberg and Redd White are lovers or suggesting that the judge is hiding a murder weapon under his desk.
What if someone made an open world detective game full of characters, places, ect... where you have a notepad that YOU write you clues in (no pre made text written by the devs) and at the end, you would have to do a very specific set of actions that would make sense if you had really solved the crime for yourself.
The game would just present you with a crime and you would do the rest like talking to characters and searching for clues. You would be pushed to explore the world and pay attention to your environment.
That'd be really cool !
Well, that's exactly what Mean Streets in 1989 done (more or less). While I prefer FMV era Tex Murphy, Mean Streets is better in detective department (I once called it detective simulator). Kinda sad, that no obe mentioned that game here
Thank go I have found this video. Been studying C++ and unreal engine in hopes to make a detective game. Nothing feels better than knowing you came up with a solution from tools given. As such the game I'm making takes the world-building cues from the legend of Zelda breath of the wild in that I want to give the player tools to craft his story without it feeling preprogrammed that the right answer is a or b. I was at a stage where I was stuck. I wasn't too sure how to get this effect. This video helped a lot. I might still be on track to get a demo out by year-end. Here is to hoping :)
Totally agree with Her Story. It's the most satisfying mistery game I've ever played! I also recommend Hotel Dusk for its atmosphere, puzzles and the investigation between multiple cases and people connected in a hotel.
Witcher 1 has a fantastic detective story arch with Raymond that a whole act revolves around. You can skip right through if you go to the right place as well. The game doesn't guide you at all and can make you do some bad things all by yourself if you think about the case wrong
The bit is very non-linear and is so good compared to the rest of witcher 1 lol
Also other main missions (not all) offers to freedom and choices depend on your observation. Even side quests play like that. And seeing your investigation has conclusion is amazing. Witcher 3 has too like the side quest Carnal Sins and Skellige throne missions.
This is a little late (almost exactly a year late, in fact) but one of the more interesting ways to get a 'proper' detective experience is to put the crime in the hands of another player in a sandbox environment; for example, Space Station 13.
Longpost incoming.
Not every round or server is going to have any crimes worth actually investigating, but when they come up it can feel extremely rewarding to piece together evidence and figure out who did the crime and how in the precious little time you're given, especially in codebases where your detective tools are cotton swabs, fingerprint powder, and tweezers for fibers instead of the handy 'do-everything' device.
You can do everything from interviewing other players, to determining which pieces of evidence are actually relevant to the case, to just making wild accusations all on your own initiative, since the game is entirely a sandbox driven by the players themselves.
Since this requires both having a keen eye for detail and some understanding of how the various mechanics interact with eachother, it can be difficult to actually pull off as a job, although some people make some.. weird mistakes, from my experience.
As an example, I was present for a round in which a low-ranking crewmember allegedly broke into medbay and tampered with equipment. The other detective on-duty investigated the scene while the perp was being interviewed by security, and came back to analyze the evidence. On their way back, they passed the interview room, in which the perp was sitting at the table with a pair of insulated gloves, a distinctive overcoat, and a departmental uniform.
Of course, the detective said he found no fingerprints belonging to non-medical personnel on the scene, and declared that the perp was not their man.
I had to bring up the fact that the perp was wearing gloves and asked if they'd collected any fibers from the scene; cue the detective sheepishly coming up with an excuse about needing to 'check an airlock they'd missed on the scene' and coming back with fibers from insulated gloves, an overcoat, and the same uniform found on a number of items in medbay.
For another example, I was called to a curious case involving a disembodied brain and heart that had been left out on a table in the public. Blood samples on both items identified the victim (as well as the fact that the game names each brain after the character they were taken from, doh), fibers pointed to the chief medical officer, and fingerprints pointed towards.. nobody. No records whatsoever for the recorded prints.
This was kind of irritating, but I knew that this particular codebase removed crew records whenever the crewmember leaves the station by cryostorage, teleporter, or tram (kind of a pain, though), and since there wasn't a CMO aboard I knew the perp had most likely left the station. I asked around and sure enough somebody recalled there being a CMO at some point, and a quick check of the storage/departure logs in cryo, the teleporter, and the tram station told me the name of the CMO, that they'd left, and that they brought their uniform and equipment with them.
I would've investigated the medbay surgery theatre to look for more evidence, but the surgeon demanded a warrant and the chief of security wasn't exactly competent, spending a few minutes milling around asking people how to write a warrant before eventually disappearing to commit suicide in her office for reasons unknown.
That one was fun to figure out; the Captain called it and I found him in the office with the body handling her gun and talking about how cool it was, with the room's weapon recharger active. Asked him if it was already charging when he got there, and he told me he'd put one of the weapon's energy cells in there. Fun stuff, found his prints and uniform fibers on everything.
With no other possible suspects, he would've ended up nailed to the wall over it - that is, if an autopsy performed by a helpful doctor hadn't given us conclusive evidence that it was a self-termination, but his incessant need to handle every piece of evidence in the room came in handy when he absent-mindedly slid open a morgue tray containing the body of the victim of the previous debraining, which let me at least confirm that the body was in medbay's custody all along.
Anyway, SS13 is pretty fun, and doing detective work can be engaging and rewarding.. provided you actually have a case to crack. More often than not, criminals are very overt and it's usually open and shut on who committed a crime. Still, there's those few other cases, and you can impress colleagues by figuring out who took the donuts in the meantime.
Great video like always ! Personally the last good "detective game" that I played was "A Normal Lost Phone", you get a lost phone without credit and wi-fi and you can try to discover why this phone was lost, you have to be a real detective with all the things that you mentioned to make a good detective game, but with only the interface of a Phone and your mind. The only downside of the game is that it is a little bit easy, but very interesting.
This video was brilliant. I have for the last few years been attempting to articulate and organize all of the problems with many detective games and have them addressed exactly as this video has succeeded in doing. Not only have you done so wonderfully, you've introduced examples for each of these points that have handled them well not so much as a perfect solution but a standard to go by.
I myself intend to create a detective game I feel will truly allow the player to solve all the puzzles on their own without unnecessary spoonfeeding while simultaneously not giving any puzzles that are too difficult or unreasonable to solve, and I will be referencing this video and the source examples provided here. I cannot thank you enough and I am very happy I saved this video to watch when I did.
Big props for use of music from Hotel Dusk: Room 215. Severely overlooked point and click game from the DS!
In the Game "999" one of many things you can do is that you can find out, how the first person in this game dies, by combinating clues and using mathematics to make an assumption, which will make sense halfway through the game, so you know what's up before it even gets revealed near the very end as a small part of the whole mystery, so you can make some descisions, following your lead or connect the dots to get some answers of questions or scenarios which are a mystery yet.
The thing is, this is all optional and not part of any mission or objective, that you have to do! You can finish this game, without understanding what's going on and have it all revealed at the end as a giant mindfuck you propably have to read a wiki afterwards, if you didn't pay attention before.
But the fact, that the game gives you enough clues to find it out by yourself and make it your responsibility to give yourself the task of understanding it all is a huge part of the fun in this game for me personally.
Are you by any chance talking 9 doors 9 persons 9 something? Idk
I know that L.A. Noire is far from a perfect or even a "good" detective game in its own right, but I think it is a great "detective TV show" game. I love it dearly, for being one of the most fastidious games ever created. I still maintain that the 1947 recreation of Los Angeles in that game is the most detailed digital representation of any city committed to video games so far.
*waits for him to mention Phoenix Wright*
Danny Kazari The concept is the same too, but most of the story itself reveals whilst in court.
I'm glad that the one thing I was thinking was top comment
It's called Ace Attorney ffs
I was so stressed about that too
The "Ace Attorney" games have a lot of detective elements, but it's ultimately a lawyer game. Yes, there is a lot of overlap, but there is one key difference: in detective games you have to DEDUCE what hapened. In other words, DEDUCTIVE reasoning. In the "Ace Attorney" games you have to PROVE it hapened. In other words, INDUCTIVE reasoning.
So basically, they are different scratches for different itches. But again, there is a lot of overlap, so there is a lot to learn from both approaches. Or even make a system where you have to use both types of reasoning at different times.
Now is the perfect time to revisit to bring up Shadows of Doubt - a Deus Ex style freeform procedurally generated detective game.
Something not touched on in the video is how important it is for the solution to still be easy enough for most players to find out. The eureka moment is the most underwhelming when you aren't even able to get to it. The best way is for games to hint at the solution in ways subtle enough for the player to understand them, but still think they found out the solution all on their own without any hints.
The problem is real detective work doesn't work like it does in the movies and most people don't think like the tv and movie detectives who can make wild guesses about a murder and are right because the script says they are.
Real detectives only talk to the suspects at the station. Making a realistic detective film would get rather dull if every scene takes place in the same room.
There are movies (and excellent ones) who mostly take place in one room... So why not ?
Twelve Angry Men comes to mind.
Assiman The episode of Homicide: Life on the street "Three men and Adena"
I love how my favourite detective game isn't even a game about solving a case, but a space exploration game called outer wilds
It is an exploration game. Well, you kinda need to make a few deductions to get inside the Ash Twin Project (I don't think it's written anywhere that the Ash's tower on Ash itself goes inside the Project), on the surface of Quantum Moon (it literally tells you to take a photo of the quantum object to keep it in place though) and The Eye (combining the three Quantum Laws). It's like 5% of the game. 5% of it are puzzles (learning the Quantum Laws) The other 90% are
1. Go where you can.
2. Find some writings to translate.
3. Follow the instructions to reach more places.
4. Repeat.
10:30 I know the answer!
It’s Leon!
...
ha ha Danganronpa.
as soon as i saw gibberish written on a wall i was like "aha!" and turned my head upside down. danganronpa sticks with you, eh
11037
Nice
I think you meant M E A T O N T H E B O N E
*insert Joseph Anderson losing his shit over 11037*
Highly detailed research and presentation on game mechanics available for detective works. Especially those that differentiate player understanding vs brute force trial and error. My heartfelt gratitude!
Cons of developing commercial detective game:
-Too much effort needed. For every correct clue, tens or hundreds of highly detailed red herrings to create. Also contents for story branches for incorrect deductions.
-High chance player won't get to experience most of the contents, leading to players undervaluating the game, despite immense amount of work developers put in.
-Common weakness of puzzle games: once solved, very little replayability. High content burn rate.
However detective games are even more essential in current time. Your understanding of the game world is tested rather than mastery of game mechanic, putting players in focused learning mode. It can cover far wider subjects rather than those tied to game mechanic.
Seriously, thank you for this video. I'm working on a story driven detective game at the moment and this video has given me loads of ideas on how I can make my game much more interesting to play. I do find there's a need to balance the feeling of actually solving the crime with not making it too difficult for the player to figure out - none of us are real detectives after all - but having game play systems in place that allow you to actually "puzzle" through the crimes is going to make my game so much better!
I love how they use the background music from Hotel Dusk!
The Witcher games have had some pretty great detective stories that require the player to make some deductions on their own, and can lead to pretty disastrous outcomes if you get some stuff wrong.
6:27 "we absolutely dunk on the poor fella"
Wasn't kidding when he said "poor".
skeeth
Even Mark Brown is mean to poor Gumshoe
I'm watching The Wire at the moment (on season 3 now) and it's definitely one of the best things I've ever seen. The way everything interconnects
Really appreciate that you've blured input field in "Her story" to not giveaway any spoilers. Thanks!
I recommend "the unheard" on steam for a good detective game. It bungles the answer part by prompting with questions, but the rest of the game is solid, with a freedom of information provided and non handhold gameplay.
Yes. I love this game. It feels so rewarding to get right, and you really have to work hard and fully understand the situation. I agree the answer part could be better as you could just guess though, but it's fun enough that you don't want to
Ah yes, "Oogle", everyone's favorite search engine. (14:10)
Well this was well timed... My bike got stolen and the bike lock cut through on a MAIN ROAD in broad daylight. If anyone here is a good detective let me know
+Harry Manocha starting dusting for prints! Get on the case!
No, no. Finger prints!
I don't think so!
*IT WAS THE BUTLER!!!*
Guys in a truck, they stop right next to your bike, cut the lock, put bike in back of truck. Sold the stolen bike that is now hundreds of kilometers away.
Even with cameras, nothing will be done.
To solve the problem discussed at 10:55… instead of having a bank of phrases you could have a large word bank of common words, useful words, red herring words, and random words. Maybe 250-500 words large. It would be a like a dictionary that you could make your own phrase bank with to then answer thought puzzles.
Mine was the DS game
9 hours 9 doors 9 person...
Everytime you get an ending you get a little piece of the big picture and solving puzzles have more purepose than just obstacle but tells the story of every room you go through... It was so satisfying when I finished that game when I was a kid :)
I love that game! (And the sequels, of course)
Man you could have given a small warning for Mystic River lol, I went into that movie expecting a murder mystery crime thriller following the adventure of our two main detectives but instead I came out of it as a bit of a emotional wreck 🥲😭.
In detective games I really wish you'd mention Danganronpa.
I was waiting for that the entire time, especially when he mentioned "finish the conclusion with a timeline of the events", but it never came...
Me 2
But apart from the putting things in chronological order and all the other dumb mimigames, it's basically just Phoenix wright except all the options are narrowed down for you. The game shows you which evidence could be useful, it shows you which statements may have contradictions and little choice as well as having to awkwardly time your trusty bullet shots.
L.A. Noire was sooo good! We definitely need a second one, not just a remaster
One detective game I really liked was Blade Runner, a 1997 videogame where you play another Blade Runner with a story parallel to Deckard's one in the movie. You had to guess who committed the crimes and who was or wasn't a Replicant. First great idea was that it changed everytime : in your first play, you could be human, this particular kid would be a Replicant and this merchant another one, but your friend would play it and find out they were a Replicant while the merchant was human. So it really was about you guessing things everytime. The story could also evolve in lots of different ways : if you picked up one clue but missed another, one of your colleagues might progress on the case while you were away. You could resolve the story in multiple ways depending on your choices, your guesses ... and the randomization of the setting.
It's not entirely a detective game but I really liked the fact that I wasn't meant to guess everything and it could evolve differently, based on what I did or did not figure. There were a lot of tools (scanning photos, interviewing people, finding evidence, analysing them at the lab, presenting them to the suspects, go to some place, forget to go to another) and nothing was forced upon you. It was a very great and perhaps underrated (or forgotten) game.
Yo. Really glad you mentioned the Shivah. Bought that game on a lark a few years back and I still look back on it as one of the most pleasant of surprises ive ever had buying something random on steam